Henry Thoreau in the Library
Presented by Dr. Beth Witherell
Wednesday, April 12, 2000, 7:30 pm
Staff Lounge, Founders Memorial Library
Why a new edition of the writings of Henry David Thoreau? This question was posed as part the fourth and final presentation in the Friends of NIU Libraries 1999-2000 program series. Entitled "Thoreau in the Library," the speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Witherell, was introduced by Lihong Xie, Assistant Editor of the Thoreau Editions Project. Dr. Witherell has been associated with the project since 1974, and for the past twenty years has served as Chief Editor. The Project came to the Northern Illinois University Libraries in 1999 from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Thoreau in the Library has a double meaning. Thoreau made a lot of use of the libraries in his day, and now libraries provide access to his writings, help preserve his work, and provide support for efforts like the Thoreau Project. Thoreau was able to get borrowing privileges to the Harvard University library (the largest academic library then as now), made use of other private libraries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson's, and built his own library composed of over 400 volumes.
Founded in 1966, the goal of The Thoreau Edition is to recover the lost words of one of America's most influential writers and to answer the pressing need for a complete, definitive, annotated and readily available edition of his writings. The series will present a new scholarly study of Thoreau's writings in a text that is as close to Thoreau as possible. This new edition will appeal to the scholar, but will also be of interest to the general reader. The series, entitled The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, is being published by Princeton University Press with financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To date, twelve volumes out of a projected thirty have been printed. These texts differ from their predecessors, either because they contain previously unpublished manuscript material or because they correct and augment texts already in the Thoreau canon.
By the end of his life, Thoreau had authored only two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and Walden's Pond, and a handful of essays. Yet, he was a prodigious writer. Thoreau's writings are found in his journal, correspondence, and manuscripts. The original manuscripts were sent out to a firm were four women spent two years transcribing. When completed, the original copies were likely tossed out. The transcription had many inaccuracies, both in grammar and punctuation, and the text did not represent Thoreau accurately. The transcriptions were further complicated by Thoreau's handwriting, said to come from "a miserable hand." Thoreau had no heirs to keep his papers, and eventually his writings were divided among collectors W. A. White, W. K. Bixby, Steven Wakeman and Houghton Mifflin.
Early editions of Thoreau's work came from these collections, especially from Houghton Mifflin. The twenty-volume 1906 set of Thoreau's writings, the only edition that attempts completeness, represents about half of the material now available. Editors picked out what they wanted the left the rest behind, for example, Thoreau's careful observation and recording of plants was edited out of his published journal. Other editors would eliminate potentially offensive segments, for example, Thoreau's writing on pantheism. Each publisher of Thoreau's writing had a format and design style that altered what the author said. Punctuation was sometimes changed that in turn changed the meaning. The Thoreau Project will attempt to correct these inaccuracies. Ultimately, the project's editors would to place on the Internet a copy of the original manuscript side-by-side with the translated copy; however, the expense is prohibitive at this time.
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/
- Byron Anderson
Image of Thoreau--Maxham daguerreotype, dated June 18, 1856, courtesy of the Thoreau Society
For more information, please call (815) 753-9838 or e-mail libraryfriend@niu.edu.
Last Updated: August 30, 2007