Thoreau, Henry David

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe, 1849

12mo (7  3/4  x 4  7/8  in.; 197 x 125 mm). With terminal ad leaf for Walden; ad leaf, terminal blank, and rear free endpaper detached, initial and terminal blanks browned, scattered spotting and soiling, wood-engraved portrait of Thoreau mounted to blank opposite title. Later brown buckram, maroon morocco spine label; worn and rubbed, hinges cracked, front free endpaper missing. Half blue morocco slipcase, chemise.

Theo Brown (signature) — James S. Copley Library (bookplate; sale, Sotheby's New York, 17 June 2010, lot 432)

Allen 2; BAL 20104; Borst A1.1.a; cf. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, p. 327

First edition, first issue of Thoreau's first book, inscribed by Thoreau in pencil on the recto of an initial blank: "Henry D. Thoreau, Concord Mass," and with a few minor corrections in Thoreau's hand.The verso of the same leaf is also signed in pencil by Theo Brown, one of Thoreau's close friends in Worcester. 

Theo Brown was "a tailor and wit of [Worcester] whom Thoreau met in 1849," the year he published A Week on the Concord at his own expense.  "On his occasional visits to Worcester, Thoreau would sit in the back window of Brown's tailor shop at the corner of Main and Pearl streets, 'fashioning the habiliments of the soul, while near him Theo would calmly contrive cutting out habiliments for the wear of the body, and Harry Blake, with eyes glistening with delight behind his gold-bowed glasses, would follow the arguments of each'" (Richardson, quoting Mary Thacker Higginson).

This book fared poorly and is now uncommon: of the 1,000 copies printed, 706 were returned to the author. An important copy of a key work of American literature, signed by the author and the recipient; only one other copy of A Week signed by Thoreau has appeared at auction in the last thirty years.