Thoreau, Henry David

Estimate

20,000 - 30,000 USD

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Description

Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854
Paper, Ink, Cloth

8vo. Publisher's brown cloth stamped in gilt and blind. Spine ends worn with some loss, tips of corners exposed, cloth with minor rubbing and fading, front hinge a bit weak. Red half-morocco case.

Literature

BAL 20106

Catalogue Note

First edition (ads dated May, no priority). With an original manuscript leaf from the journals tipped in.

Thoreau’s great work, a cornerstone of American transcendentalism. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived". Combining nature, philosophy and the classics, Thoreau's account of his year in a shack along the shore of Walden pond was wholly unlike what had come before, and his achievement was a uniquely American contribution to literature.

Laid down on the fly leaf is a manuscript fragment from one of Thoreau's journals. The author recorded his thoughts almost daily from October 1937 until November 1861. The fragment at hand states:

“By moonlight all is simple. We are not oppressed by a multitude of objects but can erect ourselves. We are no longer distracted. All is simple as bread and water—it is simple as the rudiments of an art,-- a lesson to be taken before sunlight, perhaps, to prepare us for that." (See 22 September 1854, Journal VII:50-51)