The Thoreau Update

The e-newsletter from the Walden Woods Project’s
Thoreau Institute Library

 

 
 

E-Newsletter Winter 2004/2005
Volume 1, Issue 1
Curator of Collections: Jeffrey S. Cramer

 

"I have sometimes imagined a library, i.e. a collection of the works of true poets, philosophers, naturalists, etc., deposited not in a brick and marble edifice in a crowded and dusty city. . . but rather far away in the depths of the primitive forest. . ." 
— Henry D. Thoreau,   3 February 1852

 

New: The Richard F. Fleck Collection:

 

Arrowhead drawing by Thoreau 
[Journal: 28 March 1859]

 

Richard F. Fleck is the author of a scholarly study, Thoreau And Muir Among The Indians. He is the editor of selections of Thoreau's "Indian Notebooks" in his book The Indians of Thoreau and of numerous paperback reprints of Thoreau including the first Japanese edition (in English with textual notes in Japanese) of Thoreau's The Maine Woods. He is also the author of the scholarly study, Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, and is the editor of several reprint editions of John Muir's writings, including Our National Parks and Mountaineering Essays, as well as an edition of S. Hall Young's Alaska Days with John Muir. 

 

For more information, go to:

http://www.walden.org/institute/Collections/Fleck/Fleck.html

 

Sample from our new Thoreau Quotation page: 

On Simplicity

·         Simplify, simplify. [Walden]

·         As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth. [Journal 22 October 1853]

·         Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. [Walden]

·         I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. [Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 27 March 1848]

·         The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom. [Journal 1 September 1853]

·         To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives?—and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared to live more worthily and profitably? [Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake, 26 September 1855]

For other quotations, go to:

http://www.walden.org/institute/thoreau/writings/Quotations/Quotations.htm

 

 

 

From a woodcut based on the Walton Ricketson bas-relief, first published in Alexander Japp's "Henry David Thoreau" in Welcome (November 1887).
The Walter Harding Collection of the Thoreau Society.

 

For other images, go to:

 

Recent additions to the Collections:

 

·         Cafaro, Philip Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue Georgia, 2004)

·         Delano, Sterling F. Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Belknap Press, 2004)

·         Donohue, Brian The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord  (Yale, 2004)

·         Gatte, John Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present Oxford, 2004)

·         Gessner, David Sick of Nature (Dartmouth College Press, 2004)

·         Hershkowitz, Allen Bronx Ecology: Blueprint for a New Environmentalism Island Press, 2002)

·         Holmes, Madelyn American Women Conservationists: Twelve Profiles (McFarland, 2004)

·         Holownia, Thaddeus Walden Pond, Revisited  (Anchorage Press, 2001-2002) 3 volumes

·         Hubbell, George Shelton A Concordance to the Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson (H.W. Wilson, 1932)

·         Merkel, Jim Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth (New Society Publishers, 2003)

·         Nearing, Scott:

o        Black America (Vanguard Press, 1912)

o        The Super Race: An American Problem (B. W. Huebsch, 1912)

o        Woman and Social Progress: A Discussion of the Biologic, Domestic, Industrial and Social Possibilities of American Women (Macmillan 1912)

·         Robinson, David M. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (Cornell, 2004)

·         Thoreau, Henry David:

o        Letters to a Spiritual Seeker Edited by Bradley P. Dean (Norton, 2004)

o        Walden  with photographs by Scot Miller (Houghton-Mifflin, 2004)

o        Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer (Yale, 2004)

 

For more information about these titles, go to Thoreau Institute Library Catalog

Help support the mission of the Walden Woods Project through the purchase of Thoreau’s Walden in one of these two new editions:

 

 

The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods

44 Baker Farm, Lincoln, MA 01773-3004

Phone/Fax: (781) 259-4730  ~  E-mail: Jeff.Cramer@walden.org

 

We’re on the Web!  See us at: www.walden.org/institute