“Please, Sir, Would You Sign My Book to Henry David Thoreau?”

  One of the risks of becoming a Thoreauvian, it seems to me, is that one can never predict what enthusiasms an admiration for Thoreau will bring down on us. For me it has been an eccentric form of book collecting. Most collectors at book signings probably ask for their first editions to be signed to themselves by the authors. A writer’s inscription penned to the collector on the title page of a valued book creates a one-of-a-kind volume. The actual words may be few, but the owner’s name within the inscription suggests a personal experience with the author: you shared words, the book passed from the author’s hands to yours, and you bonded in a special way with the creator of books you love. I always have my books inscribed to Henry David Thoreau.

  I first encountered Thoreau when I read Walden as an undergraduate. His take on life’s options and nature’s place in those options electrified me. By carefully selecting my classes and, most importantly, changing my major, I began an academic career that carried me through a doctoral dissertation on Thoreau and three decades of teaching Walden.

  The idea to collect books signed to Thoreau came about by chance rather than design in 1988. I was standing in a queue at a bookshop in London waiting my tum to have Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town, sign a copy of his biography. As I thumbed the index of Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, I noticed a reference to civil disobedience. Apartheid, the system of white domination, reigned in South Africa at the time, and Nelson Mandela was yet in prison. I noted that Archbishop Tutu was controversial for having led the South African Council of Churches to pronounce in favor of civil disobedience against the white government. I thought that explained the squad of policemen observing our queue. Civil disobedience on my mind, I stepped up to the table and without forethought said to Archbishop Tutu, “Would you sign my book to Henry David Thoreau?”

  The occasion is still clear in my memory. The Archbishop knew Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” and we had a brief discussion of Thoreau’s influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He then signed his biography: “Henry David Thoreau: God Bless and Thanks for Your Example. Desmond Tutu 22.4.88.” As I wandered off, I realized Thoreau’s name had been an introduction to a personal encounter with Desmond Tutu and a reason for a unique inscription in the book. Would Thoreau’s name work similar magic the next time I asked for a signature?

  At this date I have a special collection of fourscore books signed or inscribed to Thoreau. Many of the signings live in my memory as episodes of human drama, as when I obtained Salman Rushdie’s inscription to Thoreau in London in 1996, while he was under the threat of the fatwa, or because of the spirit of the writers still visible in the generosity of their inscriptions to Thoreau. Writers certainly do know who Thoreau is. Occasionally someone will need help with spelling his name, but no more than twice in over a decade of collecting have I met a writer who had no knowledge of Thoreau or his work.

  Another discovery that has impressed me about writers is not only do they know who Thoreau is, but often they pay generous respect to his memory. For example, Ben Okri, the African writer with Booker prizes for both his fiction and his poetry, wrote such an homage to Thoreau in his 1991 volume of poems, An African Elegy. “To Henry David Thoreau,” he wrote, “for your wonderful spirit which shines still through the ages.” The Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels responded in like kind in her Booker-prize novel Fugitive Pieces, signing “in honour of Henry David Thoreau- may his spirit live long.” Tony Kushner signed a copy of the playbook for his Angels in America with this tribute: “To Henry David Thoreau with great admiration. Best wishes, Tony Kushner.”

  It has been my experience that writers of mystery novels are gracious to meet and free with their words. Gillian Roberts (Judith Greber), for example, who sets her Amanda Pepper series in Philadelphia, was so impressed with the concept of a Thoreau collection that she mentioned Walden Pond in her inscription in The Bluest Blood. She wrote: “May 9, 1998. To Henry David Thoreau- Philadelphia is a bit less serene than Walden Pond, but enjoy it, anyway! Best, Gillian Roberts. (It’s great to know there is reading beyond the beyond . . .).”

  Kent Anderson’s powerful crime novel, Night Dogs, first appeared in a limited edition from Dennis McMillan Publications in Tucson. Kent had signed his books beforehand, during the rush by collectors to find rare copies. However, when I saw him he took time to personalize my book for Thoreau: “For Henry David Thoreau—Down at the Pond, who like me, sees the world through a Night Dog’s eyes, not a Cop’s—Kent—the Moon is the Night Dog’s Sun.”

  For some reason that perhaps Gillian and Kent would know, crime writers are the ones who have used the image of Walden Pond in their inscriptions. Valerie Miner inserted Walden into her message in my copy of Murder in the English Department: “For Henry David Thoreau, see you at the pond, Valerie Miner 6 March, 1990.” Gary Alexander signed his delightful Kiel and the Opium War, a 1990 first edition, addressing Thoreau in the familiar as though they were good buddies: “For Henry David Thoreau, Hank, please enjoy. I’ll stop by the next time I’m near the Pond. Gary Alexander.” The pond also appeared in Stephen Greenleaf’s note in his John Marshall Tanner mystery, Southern Cross, when he wrote, “To Henry David Thoreau—from another writer who’s spent some time by the pond. All the best, Stephen Greenleaf.” And, again, Lawrence Block followed the mystery writer’s custom when he signed his Matt Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, with this direct address: “To Henry David Thoreau—Something to read at the Pond. Lawrence Block.”

  However, a mystery novelist became the only writer to this day who ever vocally refused to sign a book to Thoreau. My wife and I had gone to a reading by several mystery writers in London. After the reading I picked up a novel by Ruth Rendell and one by Michael Dibdin, both writers sitting side-by-side at a table. When I offered Kissing the Gunners Daughter to Ruth Rendell, with my request for an inscription to Henry David Thoreau, she declined, saying, “I won’t sign a book to a dead person.” Hearing her decline, Michael Dibdin leaned over and suggested, “Hand it to me. I sign books to dead people all the time!” Whereupon he signed his novel Dirty Tricks like this: “To Henry David Thoreau, with great admiration. Michael (Love your stuff, baby!)” After Michael signed his novel, Ms. Rendell, laughing and apparently seeking a compromise, asked my name, then signed her novel: “To Lonnie Willis, an admirer of Henry David Thoreau, Ruth Rendell.” After that occasion it was only Norman Mailer who ever insisted on using my name in a convoluted manner when he signed my copy of The Armies of the Night this way: “To Lonnie Willis by way of Thoreau, Norman Mailer.”

  The one use of my own name in an inscription for Thoreau that gives me most pleasure, however, occurs in a small, thin biography of Thoreau, titled simply Thoreau, written by the Welsh naturalist, William Condry, who on one occasion addressed the Annual Meeting of the Thoreau Society. Mr. Condry was a conservationist and student of nature whose spirit so resembled Thoreau’s that it was hard to tell them apart. He wrote this modest inscription in his fine analysis of Thoreau’s life: “For Thoreau and Lonnie Willis I dedicate this copy of my unillustrious little book.” The world lost another Thoreau when Mr. Condry died in 1998.

  From time to time I have felt guilty about putting writers in an awkward spot with my odd requests, assuming their acquaintance with Thoreau. No writer, however, has ever been rude, and I have been pleased to find most of them identify the writer of Walden at once. But my startling comeuppance resulted after my usual request was put to Allen Ginsberg.

  Ginsberg had finished a breathtaking reading of his poems at my university, then had sat at a table where he graciously attended a crowd of readers and their volumes of his poetry. My turn came, and I placed my copy of White Shroud on the table. I asked, “Mr. Ginsberg, would you please sign my book to Henry David Thoreau?” Ginsberg started to sign, stopped, put his pen down, and looked at me. “You are going about this all wrong,” he said. “Obviously, you love Thoreau and his writings. That’s why you want his name on the book, but your approach is wrong.” He then lectured me for several minutes, explaining how I should first offer any writer a context for giving a Thoreau inscription, that I identify Thoreau and give a reason for my own appreciation of his writing. Lecture finished, Mr. Ginsberg wove in black ink among the printed words of the title page of White Shroud one of my most valued inscriptions: “Signed in admiration of the solitary generosity of Henry David Thoreau Allen Ginsberg 3/15/93 Boise Idaho,” followed by the capital letters “AH” in a circle.

  Subsequently, I have followed Allen Ginsberg’s advice and have, I hope, articulated my Thoreauvian quest with a lighter touch. Perhaps more context for my own love of Thoreau’s ideas has resulted in a better chance for other writers to articulate their appreciation of his works. When John Fowles was inscribing a copy of Daniel Marlin to Thoreau (“whom life preserve”) in 1997, he spoke with energy on his recent reading of one of Thoreau’s essays about nature. And Annie Proulx drew upon her own memory of Thoreau’s images when she inscribed the lovely first British edition of Heart Songs, writing “E. Annie Proulx (in the memory of Henry David Thoreau) ‘ . . . the clanking of geese down the sky . . . .’”

  Perhaps the finest articulation of love for Thoreau was penned in a copy of An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams. At the time of the book’s publication, in 1994, she was Naturalist-in-Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History, and she had most recently published her widely respected book, Refuge. On the cover of An Unspoken Hunger, the poet W. S. Merwin described Terry Tempest William’s “awareness of the life around us, which we have learned to call ‘nature.’” Inside my copy of An Unspoken Hunger she composed this “letter poem” to Thoreau:

This sort of recognition of Thoreau’s greatness by a writer like Terry Tempest Williams grants a special essence to my “Thoreau books” and to the man they honor.

  For me as a Thoreau collector, I guess Dee Dee Ramone said it all after he slung on a Gibson guitar and riffed old Ramones tunes in a dark London basement, then set up to sign copies of his autobiography, Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones. After having his spelling of Thoreau’s name nudged a bit by someone in his retinue, Dee Dee turned back to his waiting readers, gestured with one tattooed arm, and said, “Thoreau? He was a great guy!”

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Reprinted from Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 241 (Fall 2002) with permission from The Thoreau Society.