Studying Thoreau: His "Other" Books

hi everyone karine smith here again with another episode of studying thoreau where i talk about resources that you can have to um learn more about henry's writings and his life and so today i am covering his other books yes he did write something more than just walden there are others again i'm not going to cover interpretation i leave that up to you i'm talking about books here as you know i've been a throw fan henry david thoreau fan since the 1970s i worked as a librarian for a long time and uh for the last 20 years i've specifically done a lot of thoreau research i've written two books about henry and i currently serve as the supervisor of the shop at walden pond for the thoreau society at walden pond state reservation in concord massachusetts i am producing this series on my own i want to be clear that my recommendations are my own my opinions there's going to be a lot of opinion in this episode i guarantee you um so when i voice my opinion it doesn't necessarily represent the thoreau society but if we sell the books at the shop then we have made a conscious decision to do that and for every episode that i mention books i have a bibliography at www.travelswiththorough.com this one is under his other books this the links will be either to the shop at walden pond or to bookshop.org which benefits independent booksellers and which we are a part of or an aggregate website that shows you what used book dealers are currently selling those are for the out of print books now as i said with walden in the last video when you're buying copies of these books for yourself pay some attention to what you're actually getting you have enough options now to make some conscious choices so is it hardback or paperback is it basic or annotated does it have an introduction written by somebody who knows about the subject or who knows about thoreau was it released in a specific year to celebrate an anniversary that might not be important to you but it'll at least explain to you why so many books were printed in specific years uh so these are some things to consider how do you expect to use the book you know it's going to be yours what do you want it to do if you want it to do anything you want it to look pretty and sit on the shelf that's a fair one this is a fair one um but if you want to use it and you and you like i said you have some conscious choices now so let's get into this let's talk about the other books written by thoreau not walden not his journal not correspondents not specifically newer collections of essays and poems and i'll get to all of those in later videos so the very first book that we're going to talk about is a week on the concord and merrimack rivers this is henry's first book came out in 1849 this is the book that he moved to walden to write as you know in 1839 henry and his brother john paddled down the concord river and up the merrimack river to get into new hampshire and then they stowed the boat and then they hiked around the new uh the white mountains in new hampshire they actually and then they came back down got the boat battled back back home uh the actual trip took two weeks in uh a week he conflates it to one and then has chapters for each day begins with a concord a conquered chapter um but he he makes the two week into one in this book similarly in the future he will do that in walden too condensing the two years into one that begins in summer and then ends the following spring anyway this is his first book it was his tribute to john who died tragically in 1842 of tetanus lockjaw john had been his best friend and they taught school together and they explored nature together they paddled up into new hampshire this book however did not sell very well and you probably know this story but it's a good one and it is classic a row the publisher which is named monroe printed a thousand copies of the first edition of a week in 1849 and even four years later they had only gotten rid of 294 copies either sold or given away as review copies so in 1853 monroe sent back 706 copies of the first edition of a week to henry and he famously carried all the boxes up to his attic bedroom in the yellow house on main street which is where the family was living at the time and then he wrote in his journal i have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which i wrote myself isn't that great see funny henry was a funny guy and not everybody pays attention to his humor i don't understand why if you want to look up that passage in his journal it's dated october 28 1853 he talks a lot more about that that's that's the sentence you hear a lot but he talks a lot more about it and he actually puts a positive spin on the experience he actually says he's more inspired than ever before to keep on writing good for you henry i'm not sure the rest of us would feel the same way um and you also have to believe this is ninth 1853 he died in 1862. that means these boxes were there for the last eight nine years of his life i don't i don't know that they moved them in another part of the build the building the house is pretty big but i don't i don't know inspiration of boxes of unsold books i'm not sure about that so what happened to those books anyway well some of them most of them were repackaged with new covers and then sold after henry died in 1862 and they were republished in a way by tickner and fields his usual publisher as a as it turns out and they were billed as a second issue of the first edition so if you find a copy of a week that was released by tikner and fields in 1862 right after henry died you will know that the pages inside at least were ones that henry carried up to his attic bedroom i i think that's cool i i love that story should you read a week there's a question if you are a thoreau fan absolutely keep in mind that this is henry's first book and as a first-time author he wanted to tell it all so in addition to the journey of just the concord and merrimack rivers and a little bit of the white mountains he talks about other things he talks about how in 1844 he took a walkabout around new england and walked up to mount monadnock in new hampshire and then over to mount greylock in western mass then got on a train met elory channing they went over to the catskill mountains in new york came back he also writes about his views about religion uh he and this resulted in him offending at least one of his maiden aunts so this is more than just a travel narrative this is what henry was thinking and doing in the early part of his life so there are a variety of editions of a week it's not as popular as walden nothing is as popular of his as walden this is the dover edition the least expensive one you can get this one is from penguin classics it has um it has an introduction by daniel peck who is a professor at suny oneonta hi daniel and this is the princeton edition the princeton edition paperback princeton editions again are shorthand in thoreau circles for the princeton university press project where they go back to the original manuscripts and they reprint exactly as henry punctuated and and spelled and capitalized and all that kind of stuff so this is the princeton paperback has a uh introduction by american author john mcphee this is uh good because if you know john mcphee he recreated part of this trip on the water himself and wrote a really good new arc article for the new yorker about that an extensive article so that's why it makes sense that he wrote the introduction to a week now you know i always say i don't want to talk about interpretation i'm going to i'm going to divert from that for a moment a week is not as popular and it isn't written about as much as walden and other things so when you find something that's written about a week it's kind of special so i want to show you this book the rose complex weave the writing of a week on the concord and merrimack rivers by professor link johnson and it says with the text of the first draft this was released in 1986 by university press of virginia looks like it has the same look and feel as a princeton edition hardback okay but it's not i mean even down to the to the ruler on the on the end pages but it's not but he talks a lot about the writing and about henry at that time of his life early on as an early writer and again it in the back of the book it has the first draft in henry's form now this is kind of interesting and one of the reasons why i'm showing you this is there are a lot of used copies of this book out there and i have a link to them and as a librarian i decide i kind of like good books to get good homes so that's why i'm saying if you want to know more about a week and you're interested in the writing process and in his drafts the rose complex weave okay you'll be able to get it from a used book dealer and actually it'll be cheaper than that princeton paperback and that penguin paperback that i just showed you there are a lot of them out there by the way no one's ever created a fully annotated version of a week so there's a project for you if you want it okay so there's a week and then there was walden and those are the only books that henry published in his lifetime so he did write essays of course that got published in a variety of periodicals including the dial the transcendentalist periodical but for the last year of his life maybe even a little longer than the last year of his life henry and his younger sister sophia went back to his manuscripts and they started preparing things for publication knowing that that was probably going to be posthumous publication henry was suffering from consumption tuberculosis he knew his time was limited obviously and so they worked together to prepare things so when he died in may of 1862 sophia became his first literary heir and she took over management of his manuscripts and it is mainly because of her efforts along with some other friends like elory channing and ralph waldo emerson uh bronson alcott a little that we have additional books that henry wrote but he did not live to see alas and the first one of these number two in our list today is excursions this is obviously a pack a newer paperback but excursions came out in 1863 and it is a collection of nine essays that's the early uh grouse drawing of henry by the way so it came out in 1863 it's a collection of nine like i said nine uh and i want to read them to you but can i find i didn't put a bookmark in well that was my fault i didn't put a bookmark in um there we go nine uh essays along with a biographical sketch written by ralph waldo emerson so the nine essays in this excursion are natural history of massachusetts a walk to wachusett the landlord a winter walk the succession of forest trees walking autumnal tints wild apples and night and moonlight so those are the essays in the original one of these excursions this is a 1962 paperback 1962 anniversary uh year and uh it also includes an introduction by mit professor leo marks who famously wrote the book the machine in the garden so he knew what he was talking about do you need a copy of excursions if you can find it probably not because all the essays in there are going to be in a compilation volume like the portables that i showed you on the first episode um the essays do come up in thiruvian conversations though so you should know about them and they're travel and nature oriented mostly except for the landlord they're they're tribal and nature oriented that'll be good to know in about 20 minutes okay so the next book that got published is the maine woods published in 1864 and this is a collection of three essays that the roe wrote about his trips to maine he made three natural exploration trips to maine he was in maine uh other than that but he made three specific trips to may 1846 while he was living at walden 1853 and 1857. i will talk a lot about his travels in other episodes of the three essays in here two had been published earlier in periodicals while he was alive the katahdin essay was serialized in sartain's union magazine of literature and art and the chess and cook essay had been published in atlantic monthly this was then when editor james russell lowell had the audacity to edit out throws comments about a pine tree going to heaven henry did not like it when people edited his material without his permission and uh so as a result he never submitted anything else to atlantic monthly as long as james russell lowell was the editor that's a story that goes along with this book should you read the main woods probably especially if you lived in or spent time in new england but in any event in any way you very much should read the katahdin essay somehow in this book or elsewhere because this documents the time when henry had an epiphany on top of the mountain katahdin in maine or what he thought was the top of the mountain he had uh an experience up there that changed his life he found true wildness up there that passage comes up again and again in thiruvian studies and it's a pivotal pivotal moment in his life so it's good to know the context and good to know where it came from the lol story comes up a lot too so it's good to know what happened with that too so here we've got maine woods this is a penguin copy it has an introduction by american author edward hoagland this is the princeton paperback has a uh introduction by uh american writer paul theroux and then um jeff kramer curator of thoreau institute at walden woods did a fully annotated maine woods annotated edition where again when there's an annotated edition you got the main text and then you got explanations for the references in the margins by the way when i gave you recommendations about walden i told you about scott miller photographer and his coffee table book of walden he also did one for the maine woods it's out of print and i don't have a copy so i will link it up on my big bibliography of how to get used copies of it so there you go a week maine woods excursions in the middle of that and then we have next up cape cod cape cod published in 1865 this is a collection of ten essays that uh or chapters that henry gleamed from his trips to cape cod he made a total of four trips to cape cod 1849 1850 1855 and 1857. how does anybody think that this guy was a hermit he was traveling all the time and he took the train a lot too that's a story for another time so twice when he went to the cape he went with ellery twice he went on his own after the second trip he started to write essays and he started to give lectures on cape cod and then in his habit then he he made an attempt to get these lectures published in periodicals so there are 10 in here only three of them appeared in the periodical putnam's monthly and that's because editor george william curtis had some problems with the rose tone evidently curtis had made some changes to the text and thoreau reluctantly went along with them evidently but evidently the same stories that henry told to his audiences and that entertained them gleefully as mr emerson said that people laughed until they cried when they'd heard these cape cod stories evidently they didn't have the same effect on residents of the cape when they read them and some complained to putnam's monthly so curtis printed three of these chapters and sent the rest back to henry he must have been uh henry must have been dismayed and frustrated so much so that soon after that in on september 14th 1855 he wrote in his journal it costs so much to publish would it not be better for the author to put his manuscripts in a safe uh henry i'm sorry that's what happens when editors and get your stuff you know i'm sorry you had to go through that but anyway there are 10 essays in here i think what he wrote about his fourth trip which does not appear in cape cod i kind of think the fourth trip is even more interesting because he took the train to sandwich he walked across the cape to the atlantic ocean he walked up to the highland lightning walked over to provincetown it makes for great reading but i digress it's not in here so not everything that he experienced about cape cod is in here that's my story on that and i will talk about his travels otherwise should you read cape cod sure you could especially if you have your own relationship with the cape or if you are close to a dynamic ocean shoreline you're going to find common ground in here some scholars have said that it's the lightest light hardest most lighthearted and humorous book the row ever wrote well yes he was a funny guy okay shipwrecks and whale beachings aside he was a funny guy and it's not all nature he's talking about the people that he meets out there too it's a whole different world then then conquered that's for sure so here's a penguin an older penguin copy uh this has introductions by both edward hogan and paul theroux in it um here's the princeton edition and this has an introduction by robert pinsky former poet laureate of our country and again scott miller has a coffee table book on cape cod that you could get to so there we go we're up to [Music] me talking a little bit more about about henry's travels so we got a week we got main woods we got cape cod rivers and mountains a variety of habitats and environments these were not vacations that henry was taking you know these were excursions as he called them deliberate ones deliberately going to other places and seeing what the nature was like there and was seeing how the people lived there and um see how it was different from concord and the fields and forests and streets that he saw every day around his hometown he searched for wildness he searched for the unusual and then he documented whatever he saw and then uh you know when he wrote about it and when it got published then we could read a little bit about it and we could experience a little bit about that ourselves especially if we were prompted by that to go and find it ourselves and one of the most unusual places that he went to was in quebec in 1850 with his friend ellery i mean quebec it looks medieval there are walls and stone forts and soldiers in his time and catholic churches which he'd never seen before and people who only spoke french and know english how could this even be you know concord and quebec city were both founded in the early 1600s only 23 years apart how could they be so different and they're still different now and they're only 400 miles apart in a straight line so we have in 1866 a yankee in canada with anti-slavery and reform papers this is the last collection that sophia oversaw for publication and it contains yeah a yankee in canada five chapters that he wrote five essays that are chapters that he wrote after his time did a lot of research on canada and exploration to write them and then it's paired with 10 uh essays now i don't know the full publication story here but we got a yankee in canada and we got 10 essays thrown in i have a feeling that tikner and fields looked at the manuscripts and said you know what yankee in canada is too short to be a book on its own these 10 essays are too short to be a book on their own but maybe you know we put them together maybe they'll sell i'm paraphrasing here but i'm wondering if that was the case so what i have to show you here is a second edition of the book and i borrowed it from the fitchburg public library of fitchburg massachusetts a shout out to director sharon bernard and all of her terrific staff they do a great job and allowed me to take out their second edition of a yankee in canada okay and so here's the table of contents but before i read you the names of the 10 essays in here i want to pause for this historic moment because this publication the original one in 1866 marks the exact moment my friends when henry thoreau's essay called resistance to civil government and that he got published by elizabeth peabody in her single run issue of aesthetic papers in 1849 when that essay gets a new title and the new title is say it with me friends civil disobedience who came up with that who came up with that phrase henry didn't come up with that phrase it's not in the essay at all and this you can check for yourself because with electronic searching you know you can find a word go out go online find an electronic copy of civil disobedience look for civil look for disobedience is it in there civil is in there three times and he's quoting somebody else for a fourth or a fifth but civil's only in there three times disobedience is in there twice they're never together not even close so who came up with civil disobedience that's the phrase evidently somebody at tickner in fields you know and resistance to civil government it was the original title you know resistance and disobedience are two very different approaches to challenging authority and i'm going to go out on a limb and say that whoever came up with that probably never did either that's my opinion okay somebody made henry the poster child for civil disobedience for the rest of his reputation days and it wasn't him at least we don't think it was him did he tell sophia and ellery to change it i can't imagine did they change it i can't imagine but then i don't know them personally but i can't imagine that they would have come up with that i think it was a publisher opinion now but this is one of the mysteries of publication i think it was a publisher who said you know resistance to civil government doesn't sound good enough let's bump this up level and call it civil disobedience so if you can see there you can see that the third one is civil disobedience okay so the ten essays in here are slavery in massachusetts prayers civil disobedience a plea for captain john brown paradise to be regained herald of freedom thomas carlisle and his works life without principle wendell phillips before the conquered lyceum and the last days of john brown okay historical note number two second essay was called prayers henry thoreau did not write that it's an emerson essay ralph waldo emerson wrote that for the dial and well it appeared in the dial in july of 1842 um now there might have been some some and it was uncredited okay so it didn't say that rw emerson wrote that it was uncredited um but in his essay prayers he quotes several people and and three of these are verses and the first one's from shakespeare the second verse set of verses is from somebody i can't even figure out the third one is from a poem that henry wrote there it is now here's a an easy tip friends in henry's own writings when he quotes himself in poems he does not put quotation marks because it's all his narration all right you go and walden some of the poems that he threw into walden and a week has poems in it too his poems are ones that do not have quotes in front of them this one has quotes in front of each verse so emerson is quoting somebody he's um he's quoting thoreau now again i don't know the whole publication history of this but someone made a mistake and it could have been as easy as somebody pointing to a 24 year old copy of the dial and saying did thoreau write this and somebody's saying yes but the person pointed to the poem and not to the whole essay who even knows did did uh sophia and ellery even see a mock-up of this book these are two major these are two major guffs in this book i don't even know i don't even know so um this is the second edition this is from 1874 and by then ticker and fields had evolved into james osgood so obviously the marketing they didn't call it that then that they did was good enough to keep on selling the book and this is how civil disobedience gets out there and publicized and this is how eventually gandhi gets to read it and martin luther king jr gets to read it and everybody else gets to read it because it appeared in a book not because of elizabeth peabody's aesthetic papers because that was just a one-time thing it came out because of this book so it is a good thing okay but there's so many mysteries about this and and who even knows so who wrote civil disobedience students if your teachers ask you that you have good cause to say not henry david thoreau you can prove that probably okay so the 10 essays in here are i told you that why am i going backward okay so those were the 10 essays let's go back to yankee in canada yanking canada is five chapters as i said and again henry followed this this format he went somewhere he started researching about it he wrote wrote about it he started giving lectures about it and then he wanted to get the articles published okay so that's what he did with his essays about quebec and so he enlisted the help of horus greeley his friend who was the editor of the new york tribune and greeley looked for places to have those things published too and he landed on putnam's monthly magazine again of american literature science and art this actually happened before whoops for you before the cape cod incident okay and george william curtis the editor the same editor so putnam's motley started to publish these five essays and they got most of the way through the third one when guess what happened i think you can probably guess george william curtis took out two sentences that henry wrote about the catholic church and they weren't really necessarily criticisms and they were actually kind of making fun of himself for not knowing that much about the catholic church and saying it as an outsider but george william curtis thought that somebody could be offended guess what he was right somebody was offended and it was henry so henry said bring me bring me all my stuff back so so it only got serialized like two and three quarters of the five in there got serialized and the rest had to wait for a publication i'm going to talk about this one in a minute should you read a yankee in canada you could um you know it's not necessarily excuse me a high priority uh if you have ever visited quebec i think you should if you are catholic i think you should and you just have to read it with an open mind and realize that he's seen it as an outsider and he's he doesn't know how to you know he's going into a notre dame cathedral in montreal and not necessarily knowing what's up i'm actually working on a new edition of a yankee in canada that i hope will um remedy some of the issues around it i hope it um is attractive to people on both sides of the border and i'm also going to include directions for um following in henry and ellery's path because that's kind of cool but there are a variety of yankee books out there that still have the 10 cent the 10 essays in them um make sure well you can you can check that out i just bought this one a yankee in canada um paperback uh i bought it because i wanted to just it only has a yankee and a lot of the other paperbacks that are out there have all those essays too i only wanted a yankee and i wanted to read the forward by richard fleck he's a a former professor who in the past wrote about thoreau and also about john muir's interactions with native americans both both of them separately and um so i wanted to see what he said about quebec and this is okay it's print on demand so you know it looks like print on demand it has the text and the introduction's okay it's based on a on a lecture that he gave in the 80s it's okay but did you know there was a butt coming but here's the thing the real people read a lot and they learn a lot and they begin to know a lot and then they kind of expect others to know as much or everything and then they start to find mistakes and when you find mistakes it's not like they they go out to find them usually so when you find a mistake you kind of call it out so you knew this was coming so yeah like it's a print on demand so they're doing it quick probably okay so there's this picture on the cover and i wanted to see what it was didn't look familiar to me um but i i on the back of the title page it has a description and it has the citation of where they it came from the archive that it came from and evidently it is a depiction a photograph or a daguerreotype or one one of those processes that was taken of montreal in 1851 now this is cool because ellery and henry were there in september of 1850 so this is probably as close as we can get to what montreal looked like an example of what montreal looked like i'm sure there are others but the description in on the title page confused me because it said clearly that you could see three churches in this picture i only see one this big one and we see one and and it's not continued on the back so i was confused and i like to be confused so i looked online for the citation came up right away it's posted on wiki commons with that exact same description about the three churches and it names the other two and then it says this is a cathedral well no basically no and one of these days i'm going to log into wiki wiki commons and change that and make it more accurate because the other two and this one you just compare this to a a street map of montreal this is st patrick's church this is not the notre dame cathedral now basilica that henry and ellery went in so if if they were trying for a period depiction of montreal fine but the silent implication by saying that it's a cathedral and i think it says a and not the means that it sort of seems as though that's where henry and ellery walked in to experience a cathedral oh it does say that it says the cathedral no it's not the cathedral i can tell you that right now notre dame notre dame is not not in this picture and i got offended by this slightly but i mean that's just the way we are um but in looking at it for more than a day i started thinking you know this angle of this photograph the photographer had to be up this is not a street level photograph the photographer had to be up and had to be up two or three stories over these single floor houses actually they have gables so they're actually one and a half the photographer had to be up and you look at a road map of montreal the photographer may have been in one of the towers of the notre dame cathedral which is where henry and elory were now if someone had done their homework and researched that i would have loved it i would have loved it um but as it is okay not so much um if you want a french edition from quebec that is in the kind of vernacular that they speak in quebec this is what you need to look for so far okay i'm hoping to remedy that but so far this is all canada came out in 1962 anniversary year and uh it has a translation by adrian therian and an introduction by publisher maynard gertler i had to look that up it was published in montreal um you can see the credits there i'm not going to try to speak the french because i can't but you can find used copies of this occasionally i will link it up but right now when i looked there was only one out there okay so but that that's the most accurate one in canadian french according to our friends uh jean claudia and jacques delorme so that's a yankee in canada but of course this book was consisted of the yankee in canada and then those 10 essays what has happened to those 10 essays like i said you can probably find well i may not have said you can probably find them in a compilation volume but the way that the princeton editions have dealt with the ten essays first of all they took out prayers since emerson wrote it and uh they added a couple of other things uh other obscure thorough essays and i'm not gonna list but they made the hardback edition of the princeton edition reform papers and they just put the essays in there they put yankee aside for the time but put the 10 essays in there when they printed the paperback edition of that they called it the higher law which sounds kind of more enticing than reform papers and both have an introduction by historian american historian howard zinn i stuttered a little bit over that and both of them had an introduction by howard zinn okay and so they took out prayers they added a couple of other things and they restored the name of the essay to resistance to civil government okay so that's a yankee in canada and uh the reform papers sort of and what i forgot okay so princeton still had yankee in canada left over what did they do with it they went back and they stuck it into excursions okay so if you get the princeton edition of excursions it's like the first one that i showed you before i showed you a little paperback before but yankee and they those were essays nature and um travel oriented so yankee in canada goes really well in here so they put yankee in canada in excursion so that's the bottom line if you get the princeton edition of excursions it also includes yankee in canada what they did with the reform papers is they made them a separate volume okay you know sophia and hillary could have could have helped us out there and done this 150 years ago and divided the two and put yankee and canada in excursions but maybe they hadn't really thought of it that way i don't know i'm not their friend i don't know but anyway you know it must have given henry a great deal of satisfaction and comfort in his last days in his last year to sit down with his sister sophia and talk about these things and say okay here are my manuscripts this is what i want to have happen the three on maintenance should go together the ten on cape cod should go together the five one yankees should go together um you know they worked on other other essays too which is why we have walking in life without principle they weren't published in his lifetime but anyway um they they could sit down and figure that all out and he obviously trusted safaya to be able to do the right thing after he was gone and evidently as much as we can tell she did as much as she could and um as his first literary heir she was you know tying up all the loose ends and helping to grow and establish his literary reputation none of them would know where it would lead obviously but you know she she did as best as she could so so congratulations to her and i would not be talking about these books if she hadn't done that at least not in this format maybe someone else would have done something differently i think they should have looked at the proofs of that last book anyway those are the books that henry wrote and that sophia and ellery edited and then 125 years go by and the rose scholars are still looking at the mass of henry's manuscripts and there's there's a big pile of nature observations that looks like henry bound them together at one point and called them wild fruits but some of the papers have gone in other places and i'll explain what happens to the manuscripts totally in another another couple of episodes and i'm paraphrasing here but couldn't we do some more with this nature stuff so in 1993 it fell to bradley p dean thoreau scholar to bring out faith in a seed the first publication of thoreau's last manuscript faith in a seed and so what this is is according to his table of contents it's dispersion of seeds along with other late natural history writings called wild fruits weeds and grasses and forest trees so you know you know henry was big on nature observations now you know maybe that people didn't always know how plants and trees got established they didn't know how they reproduced they thought at one point probably that it was divine intervention that that particular plant grew in that particular patch and didn't really think about how they reproduce but henry of course keeping his meticulous observations in addition to figuring out when things bloomed and what colors the trees made in the autumn figured out as much as he could about different species and how they reproduced did they have seeds or fruits and how were those distributed um did an animal eat one and then nicely place it with fertilizer somewhere else did an animal walk past a plant and get it attached the seed attached to him and distributed somewhere along the way did the wind come and blow the blow the seeds away did the parent plant just drop it where it was and they all grew up underneath it this is what he wrote this is what he what he made observations about and this is a narrative okay it's not just statistics because he it didn't write it like that throw it in write it like that now um so that's what this is and um it features the illustrations from botanical illustrator and massachusetts artist abigail rohr r-o-r-e-r and she's done a number of um books with brad and she's just amazing amazing and not only not only individual species but also habitats and she also yeah i should have put a bookmark in there she also did this depiction of the 1861 ambro type that henry set for in august of 1861 in new bedford massachusetts and i actually got abby's permission to use this on the cover of my first book westward i go free so thanks abby beautiful beautiful and we had never had henry's seed dispersion observations in a book like this before but you know when you write a book you learn a lot as you're doing it and then you learn a lot after it's out so in 2000 brad put out wild fruits bradley p dean put out wild fruits the rose rediscovered last manuscript came out seven years after faith in a seed he had gone through and realized you know the the introduction that i did for that might not have been the introduction that henry expected it might have been that other essay called wild fruits in there and you know it might be better if we uh if we organize this with headings of the species it'll be easier to read still illustrations by abigail rohr nice map of conquered on the end papers abigail roar and bradley p p dean wild fruit so most it seems like most of faith in a seed is is in wild fruit by the way different illustrations by abby in this one than in faith in a seat so should you read faith in a seed and wild fruits you know if you really love to read what henry wrote about nature sure absolutely um you might want to start with wild fruits since that seems to be the more complete one um but you might want both okay especially for abby's illustrations i know i keep talking about illustrations but you know i think they're important too so technically speaking those are all of henry's other books to date and again i'm to in order for you to purchase them or find them i put in the links on travelswiththeroad.com on my on my website um and you know it's up to you now you can find all these in a library too of course so those are henry's other books thank you for joining me today on this episode of studying thoreau i'm going to keep on going and in the next episode it's time to talk about the journal it'll be fun thanks very much again for watching uh if you want to subscribe to the channel put a thumbs up down there below uh or uh write a comment if you know more about some of these than i do that's be great um or ring the bell and you'll get notifications so until next time i'm corrine smith have a terrific day i can't stop it

Channel: Corinne H. Smith

Views: 233

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: henry david thoreau, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, excursions, the maine woods, cape cod, a yankee in canada, resistance to civil government, civil disobedience, faith in a seed, wild fruits, transcendentalists, concord, thoreau, walden, sophia thoreau, ellery channing

Id: MdwSsgKAtQI

Length: 49min 15sec (2955 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020