Dickinson, Emily

Poems [Second Series]

Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892. [A Quite Early Printing/Edition; First Edition was published in 1891]. Hardcover. TEMPORARILY DISCOUNTED. WAS 1,450. NOW $815. A Very Good + copy of an early printing of this collection of Emily Dickinson poems, bound in olive-green cloth smooth cloth with beveled edges to the boards with the front board lettered and decorated in gilt with the Indian pipe stem motif to the front board's lower half. The spine lettering is in gilt and the "Boston // Roberts Bros" in gilt is present to the lower spine. The leaves are of laid paper with vertical chain lines. The volume s(&((hows only minor wear, the second and third front endpapers are largely detached but are still holding decently, and, all things considered, this is a nicer copy than we usually encounter. [The original box and dust jacket are lacking -- and we never have seen or known of a copy with either of them present.] The second front free endpaper's verso bears a small bookshop sticker and the third front free endpaper a prior owner's signature. There is a four-page facsimile manuscript poem shown at the front without the often-not-included tissue guard -- prior to the Poem's printed typed text. A nicer copy than we usually see without the substantial scuffing often seen. QUITE SCARCE INDEED.

NOTE THAT the following information is in large measure taken from Wikipedia:
The book was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Watlington Higginson. Mabel Loomis Todd never met the reclusive Emily Dickinson, but the two did exchange letters. In Amherst, Todd began a lengthy affair with Austin Dickinson, the (married) brother of Emily Dickinson; Austin was a prominent local lawyer who served as treasurer of Amherst College.
David Todd travelled to every solar eclipse that he could, and Mabel Loomis Todd often joined him. She accompanied her Astronomer husband when he traveled to Japan in 1887 to photograph the solar eclipse, and she was the first Western woman to walk up Mount Fuji. She accompanied David in his other efforts to photograph eclipses, traveling with him back to Japan in 1896, to Tripoli in 1900 and 1905, to the Dutch East Indies in 1901, to Chile in 1907, and to Russia in 1914. In all, Mabel Loomis Todd traveled to more than 30 countries on five continents. She wrote frequently about her travels, and often lectured on them, making her a rare public female intellectual in the late 19th century.
After Dickinson's death in 1886, her younger sister Lavinia Norcross Dickinson destroyed all her letters, as Emily had instructed. Dickinson had left no instructions for her poems, however, and originally asked her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson to oversee their publication. When Susan's work didn't quickly move the publication project forward—Susan wanted to publish the poems in a holistic volume contextualized with Dickinson's letters, jokes, manuscripts, and drawings, a publication that would be very unconventional for the time but perhaps more authentic to Dickinson's writings]—Lavinia enlisted Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The first volume of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, and included many alterations by Todd and Higginson. Higginson, who had supported Emily's writing in her lifetime and was a friendly correspondent, also collaborated with Todd on Poems: Second Series in 1891. Todd edited a two volume set of Dickinson's letters (1894) and Poems: Third Series (1896) on her own. A detailed account of the publication process is given in Ancestors' Brocades, by Millicent Todd Bingham (1945). According to scholar Brenda Wineapple, the third book, without Higginson's pleas to alter as little as possible, "is the most expurgated." At some point, Higginson, not liking Mabel Todd’s alterations to Dickinson's poems, quit the publication project. This notion, however, is contradicted by the account written by Bingham, who claimed that her mother wished to alter Dickinson’s poems as little as possible. Very good +. Item #3808

Price: $815.00