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From Pat Deveney's database:
Williamsburgh Spiritualist and Progressive Recorder, The.
A Tri-Annual Publication For The Spiritualist Society Of Brooklyn, E.D / Devoted to the Promotion of a Knowledge of the Truths of the New Dispensation.
It is proposed that the work shall be issued invariably in the months of January, May and October in each year
1866 Three times a year
Brooklyn, NY.
Editor: Anthony Truthlover.
Publisher: The Spiritual Magnetic Telegraph Agency.
1/1, May 1866.
"The design of this . . . is to present to our Williamsburgh Society of Spiritualists and Friends, a continuous record of our proceedings, with such literature of the day, or extracted from larger works by eminent authors . . . in order to form as far as possible . . . a complete miniature Spiritualist Library of instruction and entertainment." It was apparently intended to issue the journal three times a year: "It is proposed that the work shall be issued invariably in the months of January, May and October in each year." The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 10, 1869 noted the election of officers of the society for the ensuing year: Dr. B. McFarland as president and Henry Witt as secretary and treasurer. The society is noted as late as September 1870 and may have ceased when Witt died in July 1871 at the age of 37, but there is no mention of the journal after the first issue. Witt and the Spiritual Magnetic Telegraph Agency published in 1860 a series of Judge Edmonds' letters as Interesting Facts in Relation to Spirit Life ad Manifestations. The journal was a grab-bag of secondary material, largely acknowledged to be from the Banner of light. It gave reports on and transcriptions of lectures by D.D. Home, and Emma Hardinge, and carried poetry "through Joseph D. Stiles, medium," on the sufferings and regret of John Wilkes Booth in the afterlife. As befit its general theological tone, the journal carried a section entitled "Swedenborgian," but was carefully to preserve its distance from "Swedenborgians as a sect" and carried T.L. Harris's "Swedenborgians in their Relation to Spiritualism." The journal also published Lizzie Dotten's "Mr. De Splae":
He smoked, and he chewed, and he drank, and he swore;
But then every man whom the ladies adore,
Is prone to these failings—some more and some less,
Which are all overlooked in a man of address.
It also was whispered that he had betrayed
The too trusting love of an innocent maid;
But the ladies all blamed her for going astray,
While they pardoned and petted — "dear Mr. De Splae."
The editor of the journal, Anthony Truthlover (which seems to have been his real name) was the author of a series of "Letters Against Spiritualism by an Orthodox Church Member" in the Spiritual Telegraph in 1856, which, despite the title, was really only opposed to the perceived vulgarity of many spiritualists of the period. NY Historical Society.
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