Short Talk Bulletins

The Short Talk Bulletins are articles on all aspects of Masonry published by the Masonic Service Association. Almost all are online from inception in 1923 to 1936, and from 1978 to 1999, but only a random smattering of those between or after those spans.

The Bulletins have been published monthly since January 1923 and all are still available in print. They have never missed a month, but beginning in 1998 the February issues have been devoted to the Masonic Information Center annual report, and in 2001 and 2006, the January issues were annual reports of the Masonic Medical Center.

Any uncredited STBs were generally all written in-house by the resident MSA author (under various job-titles) or the Executive Secretary of the MSA. Here is a partial list of these writers:

Jan.1923-28 Uncertain, certainly Joseph Fort Newton for some, possibly Harry Haywood for others. Executive Secretary for this period was Andrew L. Randell.
1929-1957 Carl Claudy, as Executive Secretary.
1958-1963 Conrad Hahn was author, John D. Cunningham was Executive Secretary.
1963-1977 Conrad Hahn was both author and Executive Secretary.
1977-Dec.87 Stewart M.L. Pollard was both author and Executive Secretary (he had been editor since 1975).
1988-? ____
?-present Richard Fletcher is current Executive Secretary.

A statement on copyright was given by the MSA to the Grand Lodge of New York. The GLNY website explains, in part, "They explicitly grant permission to reprint any but not all of their materials: that is, if we want to reproduce one or more specific issues of Short Talks, that's fine; but we are not to put all the back issues on-line, nor to scan each new issue as it appears and post it. ... If anyone would like to scan and OCR a particular issue and send it to us in a web-friendly format, we will post it." So no one website is to have the complete collection, but if two or more sites have part of the collection each, this webpage could serve as an index for the entire collection.

Online, there are several partial collections of STBs, but none as yet with all of them. All we have looked at have been raw OCR text – no formatting and many typos. Collections are at The Masonic Trowel (1923-36, 1977-2000) and TextFiles (1923-1935 only) and Hiram's Oasis, (1923-1935, 1978-1997 in annual collections format, 1997-1998 in individual files in format, months abbreviated as ja, fe, mr, ap, ma, jn, jl, au, se, oc, no, de.)

This chart is based on a chronological index by Stephen Dafoe, from Vitruvian (.pdf), with a few corrections. A broad subject index is available at MSANA. Further information is available in the book Freemasonry's Servant, History of Masonic Service Association to 1969, by Allen E. Roberts.

All links before 2003 are to The Masonic Trowel.

* The Masonic Trowels lists an STB for Jan. 1964, but the link for Jan.64 leads to an article, 'Two Pillars', from The New Age Magazine for this date, not the STB.

If the month is just a single letter, than no entry has been found on the Internet. If it is spelled out but not bold, the entry is assumed correct. If it is in bold, we have actually checked it out for verification.