Welcome

Portage Publications is in the business of publishing documents of historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural importance. In river navigation, "portage" is the process of carrying one's vessel by land around obstacles in the river. There is effort involved, but the alternative is disaster. Portage Publications exists to find and preserve the best of the past; to carry it around the rocks of neglect and the waterfall of arrogance; and to carefully place it back in the water, where wise and thoughtful readers may benefit from it again.

Portage proudly subscribes to the ideals of freedom that at one time shone most brightly in America. A major thrust of our work is to publish documents that support these ideals. However, some documents that we publish, when considered by themselves, may not promote these same ideals. They may be important precisely because they are a contrast, a clash of ideas.

Portage primarily publishes documents that are old enough to be in the public domain. Our focus is on preserving documents that might otherwise cease to exist as the physical media that they are currently stored on (i.e. books) physically deteriorate.

Portage uses electronic media, primarily CD-ROM, to deliver its products. This greatly reduces (compared to normal print media) the cost of manufacturing, storing, and shipping the physical product. We can put many book volumes on just one CD-ROM. Perhaps more importantly, this allows us to provide valuable electronic research tools to the user. For those who prefer working with a hard (paper) copy, we provide the ability to print the documents on a computer printer. If we are aware that a document is in print, we also provide that information to the user.

Portage is constantly looking for new material to publish. If there is a document that you would like to see preserved and published, please contact us so that we can consider it for future publication.