One of the best online Masonic libraries I’ve found to date is the Count Cagliostro Masonic Library. Seventeen years in the making, this online library gives access to out-of-copyright material in pdf format such as works by Adam Weishaupt, John Yarker, Arthur Edward Waite, and Count Cagliostro himself. There are well over 5000 Masonic e-books in the collection.

Keith Carpenter, creator of the library and a Freemason himself, described how the site developed over the years:

‘Even as little as 17 years ago the internet was a very different place to what it has become today and Bit-torrents became the source of earliest books; it was partly because of this that I formed the first incarnation of the library which was a Yahoo group called From “Darkness Comes Light”. This worked for a while but due to restrictions on the file size of uploads it simply was not practical so I went in search of a file-share website; my first experience of this was in using 4Shared.com. Unfortunately this did not work out and so I moved to MEGA.nz which I have been using successfully for about 6 years.’

As the library grew, it naturally attracted Masonic researchers, and with that came recognition from the Scottish Grand Lodge:

‘Last year the WGM of Renfrewshire East approached me for permission to use the library for a Scotland wide project of Masonic education and I was invited to Glasgow where I met Bob Cooper and the WGM of Scotland.’

The library is easy to use, it is free and it is a must for any Masonic researcher.