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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Walter Harding
(1917-1996)
Description
of the Walter Harding Collection
as
prepared by Walter Harding
The Thoreau Library of Walter Harding is without question the
largest collection—public, private, or institutional—of research
materials on the life, works, and influence of Henry David Thoreau ever
gathered together. No other collection even approaches it in size,
coverage, and completeness. In fact it is doubtful if there is any other
collection even a quarter of its size. It includes more than eleven
thousand cataloged items plus many thousands more classified but
uncataloged pieces. It includes books, pamphlets, periodical articles,
newspaper clippings, photographs, microfilms, photocopies, and all sorts of
miscellaneous Thoreauviana.
It is important to point out that it
is primarily a research collection built up over a period of fifty
years by a student obsessed with the idea of finding out everything
possible about Thoreau. Out of the building of this collection have come
more than twenty-five books and hundreds of articles on Thoreau written by
that student. It is equally important to point out that it is not a
“collector’s” collection. While it includes virtually every Thoreau
first edition or limited edition, the emphasis has been upon “working
copies” rather than on pristine copies. And while it includes a few
Thoreau manuscripts and association items, the emphasis has not been there
either.
The collection includes examples of every
known book or pamphlet published about Thoreau in any language (two or
three of the rarest pamphlets in facsimile copies; many of the books and
pamphlets autographed presentation copies from the authors; a number in
multiple, variant editions).
It includes almost every edition of
any of Thoreau’s works in book or pamphlet printings—certainly more
than 95% of them—including for example nearly two hundred editions of Walden,
ranging from the first edition, through variant impressions of the early
editions, through limited editions to current paperbacks.
It includes probably 85% of all
translations of Thoreau’s works into foreign languages including
virtually every major European language and fifteen or more Asiatic
languages. The collection of Japanese translations is particularly
outstanding and includes the extremely rare first Japanese translation of
Walden of 1911.
As to Thoreau manuscript materials and
association items, it includes a two-page fragment of an early draft of
“Life without Principle,” a one-page testimony by Thoreau in a court
case, and a unique Thoreau autograph labeled “Written with closed
eyes.” There are also three books and a magazine from his personal
library each containing his signature.
There is a book from his Aunt Jane’s
library with her autograph, a bill of sale with his grandfather’s
autograph, some fragments of stained glass painted by his sister Sophia,
an oil portrait attributed to Sophia, a number of Thoreau pencils, an
original Thoreau pencil box with all labels intact, a brick from the
Walden cabin fireplace, a piece of wood from the cabin, and numerous
nails, fragments of plaster, etc, excavated at the site of the cabin.
The heart of the collection includes
virtually every
scholarly or popular article on Thoreau ever published in English and
nearly all published in a foreign language. Each of these is mounted in a
separate file folder. To give some idea of the scope of this
collection—there are more than seven hundred on Walden,
two hundred and fifty on “Civil Disobedience,” two hundred and fifty
on Walden Pond, 200 on Thoreau’s relationship with the Emersons, 200 on Cape
Cod, 150 on Thoreau family history, 150 on Thoreau’s interest in or
influence on the Orient, 100 on Thoreau’s religion, 75 on the Thoreau
pencil business, 50 on Thoreau as a lecturer, and 40 on Thoreau as a
surveyor (plus dozens of photocopies of his surveys). And this is to name
only a tiny fraction of the categories covered.
There are copies of every known
periodical devoted to Thoreau including complete runs of the Thoreau
Society Bulletin, the Thoreau Society Booklets, the Concord
Saunterer, the Thoreau Journal Quarterly, the Japanese
Thoreau Society Bulletin and such rarities as Raymond Adams’ Thoreau
Newsletter, the Walden Round Robin, the “Thoreauvian
anarchist,” Mother Earth of the 1930s, and the British Eagle
and the Serpent “dedicated to Thoreauvian idealism.” Also included
are all known special issues devoted to Thoreau such as those of the London
Bookman, Massachusetts Review, Europe, and the Colophon.
The collection includes every single
bibliography of Thoreau, primary or secondary, with most of them annotated
heavily with corrections and additions. (Many of the recent Thoreau
bibliographies, such as Borst, have depended heavily on this collection.)
There are also more than 200 bibliographical articles, checklists, Thoreau
collection and exhibition catalogs.
It also contains the major works,
particularly the journals, memoirs, and correspondences, of most of
Thoreau’s well known friends such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott,
Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson, and even such little-known friends
as Daniel Ricketson, Richard Fuller and Theo Brown. There are also
biographies (and in most cases multiple biographies) of all these figures
and many more.
It includes Xerox, photoflow or
microfilm copies of about half the doctoral dissertations done on Thoreau
and in a number of cases copies of the originals, autographed and
presented by the author. There are a number of master’s theses, a few
undergraduate honors theses, and a number of outstanding undergraduate
papers from colleges and universities all over the world.
There is a large collection of
microfilms and Xeroxes of Thoreau manuscripts, including many of the
manuscripts in private hands that are otherwise virtually inaccessible.
There is a collection of approximately
75 histories of American literature (including some in foreign languages)
and probably as many more anthologies of American literature through which
one can trace the curve of academic interest in Thoreau over the years.
There is a special collection of
Thoreau’s correspondence including folders for every known letter
written by or to him containing facsimiles of all the known extant
manuscripts of these letters and of every significant publication of any
of the letters plus annotated transcriptions and other pertinent
materials. These were prepared for the 1958 and the forth-coming Princeton
edition of his correspondence.
It includes nearly every reference
made in print to Thoreau during his lifetime (some the originals, some in
facsimile), no matter how minor the mention.
The section on Ellen Sewall, the girl
to whom he proposed, contains transcripts of more than four hundred pages
of family documents—letters, diaries, wills, etc.—the only such
collection in private hands outside the Sewall family.
A section on Harvard University
includes transcripts of all of Thoreau’s grades, the memorial history of
his class of 1837, a number of college catalogs and of undergraduate
publications of his time, a catalog of all Harvard officers, faculty and
students from 1636 through the nineteenth century, the catalog of the
Harvard Library of his day, and several histories of Harvard.
A section on the town of Concord
includes most of the annual town reports of his day, microfilms of every
Concord newspaper in his lifetime, a complete run of the rare Social
Circle Memoirs, every nineteenth century map of Concord, every Concord
history, Concord’s Births, Death and Marriages, nearly every
guide books to the town from the mid-nineteenth century to the present,
and hundreds of pamphlets and clippings related to Concord history.
There is a collection of more than a
hundred volumes which are exact duplicates of books in Thoreau’s library
or that he used frequently.
There is a collection of nearly 100
novels in which Thoreau is a character or in which one of the characters
is influenced by Thoreau. It is apparently the only such collection of its
kind. There is also a collection of every known volume of poems about
Thoreau plus hundreds of individual poems about Thoreau.
A music collection includes scores
and/or recordings of compositions inspired by Thoreau, a number of them
unpublished, plus copies of Thoreau’s own favorite pieces of music.
There are also seven letters from Charles Ives and a number of letters
from John Cage on their personal interest in Thoreau.
The collection includes the Ricketson
and Hoffman busts of Thoreau, the Wilde statue, several bas reliefs, a
number of Thoreau medals, and almost countless drawings, prints, and
photographs related to Thoreau, including copies of every known lifetime
likeness of Thoreau. There are original drawings by Clare Leighton and
Annie Dillard and a Sister Corita silkscreen. There are dozens of Thoreau
posters and a hundred or more Thoreau greeting cards. There is a
collection of several dozen Thoreau calendars, including all the rare ones
and a collection of several hundred Thoreau cartoons including several
originals.
There is a long run of the American
Almanac, the almanac Thoreau most frequently refers to, for nearly
every year of his lifetime, plus a number of business directories for
Boston, Worcester, and the state of Massachusetts. A copy of Hill’s Meteorological
Register gives the weather and temperature for eastern Massachusetts
for every day of Thoreau’s life.
There is a collection of filmstrips,
slide shows, recordings, lesson plans, course syllabi and other teaching
materials on Thoreau from schools and colleges across the country.
There is a special collection of
letters, many of them framed with appropriate photographs, from such
individuals as President Carter, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein,
Frank Lloyd Wright, John Dewey, Charles Ives, Martin Luther King, Aldous
Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Malamud, C.P. Snow,
Allen Ginsberg, Loren Eiseley, and Gene Tunney commenting on Thoreau.
There are also thousands of letters from Thoreau scholars and enthusiasts
from around the world, including virtually every outstanding Thoreau
scholar of this century, discussing, arguing, and querying about Thoreau.
The collection also includes about a hundred letters from Thoreau's friend Franklin B.
Sanborn.
There are also annotated and corrected proof sheets for many of the books
by and about Thoreau of the past forty years. It also includes notes,
drafts, proofs and corrections of all of Walter Harding’s books and
articles on Thoreau.
There is an eleven-thousand-plus card
catalog (author cards only) of the collection plus a rough draft “short
title” catalog of the first ten thousand items in the collection.
A
Note on the Text:
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