More Thoreau Please

[annise]

from the help desk

Dear editor:
I'm a Chinese and always visit your web-site that really does me a big favor. I love Henry David Thoreau and his writings (especially his essaies), but in your catalog there are few works available except his Walden and Walk. Please provide his other works such as Winter Walk, Natural History of Massachusetts and Autumnal Tints, and so on.
Thanks for your great work!
Your faithful
Ze Zhong

[ColleenMc]

Found this note from 2012 requesting more Thoreau and I was curious to see how much Thoreau on Project Gutenberg had not yet been recorded. Here's what I found, if anyone is interested in a Transcendentalist/American Literature/dude who wrote about living independently but really had his mom doing his laundry while he lived at Walden Pond kinda work:

Cape Cod Adopted as solo project by Ambsweet 13, 6/6/20: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=80635
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34392
Modern paperback edition is about 315 pages

"Cape Cod chronicles Henry David Thoreau’s journey of discovery along this evocative stretch of Massachusetts coastline, during which time he came to understand the complex relationship between the sea and the shore. He spent his nights in lighthouses, in fishing huts, and on isolated farms. He passed his days wandering the beaches, where he observed the wide variety of life and death offered up by the ocean. Through these observations, Thoreau discovered that the only way to truly know the sea—its depth, its wildness, and the natural life it contained—was to study it from the shore. Like his most famous work, Walden, Cape Cod is full of Thoreau’s unique perceptions and precise descriptions. But it is also full of his own joy and wonder at having stumbled across a new frontier so close to home, where a man may stand and “put all America behind him.” NOTE: This is the description from the currently-in-print Penguin edition -- DO NOT USE if you start a project for this book. Only quoted here to give an idea of book's contents.

Excursions
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9846
around 340 pages

Excursions is an anthology of Thoreau's work published in 1863, shortly after his death. It includes a biographical sketch by Emerson, and nine of Thoreau's shorter essays. Some have been recorded separately already as part of short nonfiction collections but the whole collection has not been. It would also be a good source for other short nonfiction selections.

Excursions and Poems
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42553
around 480 pages

This is volume V of the 20 volume complete works of Thoreau - some but not all volumes have been digitized at PG; I think the rest are available in various of the American Libraries collections at Internet Archive. This volume includes all of the essays in the above Excursions edition, minus the Emerson introduction, and in addition has a 5-chapter short work (about 100 pages) called "A Yankee in Canada" that would work as a short standalone piece. A middle section has two selections of Thoreau's translations -- "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus has been recorded previously as a stand alone solo, and there's also a 20-page selection of Pindar. The final selection is an assortment of Thoreau's original poetry, about 120 pages' worth. Many of the poems have been recorded for various short poetry collections, but we don't yet have a stand-alone volume of Thoreau's collected poetry recorded. So -- lots of choices -- stand alone poems or pieces for short non-fiction collections, the whole volume as one collection, or some combination of the contents.

Familiar Letters
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43523
around 415 pages (not counting index)

Another volume of the multivolume Riverside edition, this one has a selection of Thoreau's letters to friends and family from over the course of his lifetime.

Journals volume 01 1837-1846
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57393
around 390 pages

This is, as it says on the tin, the first volume of Thoreau's journals (the complete journals run 14 volumes). A quick skim shows that his journals are quite a melange of his daily doings (including some receipts of expenses), aphorisms, poems, and scraps of his own thoughts/essay notes, as well as quotes and poetry from others. Thoreau fans might also enjoy dipping around in the journals for selections to read as part of a short works collection.

Journals volume 02 1850-September 15, 1851
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59031
around 500 pages

Second volume of his journals, see note above. Only these first 2 volumes are on PG at this point (May of 2020).

The Service Adopted as solo project: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=80948
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60951
48Kb HTML version on PG

Stand alone short essay in 3 sections, written by Thoreau c. 1840. He submitted it to The Dial but it was declined and remained unpublished til after his death. Wikipedia description: "The essay uses war and military discipline as metaphors that, as Thoreau would have it, can instruct us in how to order and conduct our lives." Great size for a short nonfiction collection piece.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
PG link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4232
around 520 pages

From Wikipedia: "It is ostensibly the narrative of a boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, that Thoreau took with his brother John in 1839. John died of tetanus in 1842 and Thoreau wrote the book, in part, as a tribute to his memory....While the book may appear to be a travel journal, broken up into chapters for each day, this is deceptive. The actual trip took two weeks and while given passages are a literal description of the journey — from Concord, Massachusetts, down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, to the Merrimack River, up to Concord, New Hampshire, and back — much of the text is in the form of digressions by the Harvard-educated author on diverse topics such as religion, poetry, and history. Thoreau relates these topics to his own life experiences, often in the context of the rapid changes taking place in his native New England during the Industrial Revolution, changes that Thoreau often laments."

(Interesting side note: John McPhee, modern nonfiction author known for his travel and nature essays, recreated Walden's journey in 2003 and published an essay about it in the New Yorker. Thanks Wikipedia!)


So that's what is available at Project Gutenberg but not yet recorded as stand alone editions.

For any Thoreau completist who wants to go really hog wild with a massive project, there are two versions of multivolume Riverside editions of Thoreau's collected works that could be done as a long term multivolume project.

The first version of the Riverside Thoreau came out before the full journals were available. It runs 11 volumes and was published in the 1890s. It includes all his major works like Walden, Week on the Concord etc., the Familiar Letters, and 4 volumes of selections from his journals organized by season, so there's a spring/summer/fall/winter volume each containing seasonal entries across multiple years. Either the full 11 volumes or the 4 volumes of the rearranged journal selections could be an interesting multivolume project.

Then there's the BIG ONE: the 1906 Riverside of 20 volumes which contains all the major writings plus Familiar Letters in 6 volumes, then the 14 volumes of his complete journals. You can see the overview of it here at the official Walden.org website: https://www.walden.org/work/the-writings-of-henry-david-thoreau/ -- this SHOULD BE okay to use as a recording source because it's basically scans of the 1906 edition pages, but you can also find the individual volumes on the Internet Archive, and the PDFs there are easier to download as one full volume (walden.org has separate PDFs for different chapters/sections of the various volumes) which, speaking from experience, is far easier to shove into the iPad books app or the Kindle reader for those of us who read that way.

Colleen

[KevinS]

I can't believe we don't have A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers! That needs to be rectified.

[Ambsweet13]

Adding Cape Cod to the list of things I want to record. I’m from Massachusetts and spend summers on the Cape so this is definitely of interest.

[Ambsweet13]

Decided that Cape Cod is going to jump the other 10 solo/group book ideas and become my first solo project. It seems to be a manageable length with only an introduction and 10 chapters; plus it takes place in my home state so the settings should be familiar. Launching the project now!