John Baker's Home Razed; Home Page Rises

As some of you may know, I was instrumental in getting John Baker on the internet in 1995 while visiting his home in Centralia, Washington. I came up with the "School of Thought Emporium" as a humorous working title, but John being John, he ran with it and added to the website for many years, until personal problems forced him to relinquish the server space. 

Anyway, through the miracle of the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, I was able to retrieve the entire site, without many photos unfortunately, but the bulk of John's idiosyncratic body of work remains as it was originally posted.  The site is a bit of a mess by 2016 standards, but those problems can be cleaned up.

I mentioned personal problems in the first paragraph. John has had a very difficult time in recent years, losing his home and his business among other things.

Although I've made sporadic attempts to locate him I haven't been able to track him down. A couple of years ago I drove to his home in Centralia (with my son Chris in tow) and found the house abandoned.

Since that time, it's been torn down. I've been trying to reach him through a mutual contact on Facebook without success so far.

The last time I spoke to John I told him of an idea I had for publishing a small collection of his best essays with the title Baker's Dozen: 13 Essays on Marlowe and Shakespeare. To that end I'm posting John's entire website to the Marlovian website for your perusal. (If you find any essays particularly worthwhile or particularly worthless, please let me know in comment. I'll be digging into them myself as time permits.)