Walden: Or Life in the Woods (First Folio Society Edition)

THOREAU, Henry David (intro. John Updike; photographs Herbert W. Gleason). Walden: or, Life in the Woods. London: The Folio Society, 2009.

Large Quarto (32.5 × 21.5 cm). Quarter grey Morocco with green silk boards. Spine lettered in silver. Silver top edge. Satin ribbon page marker. Endpapers printed with map of Concord by Herbert W. Gleason. xxii, 282 pp. 20 black and white photographs by Herbert W. Gleason throughout, including two double-page fold-outs. Illustrated pictorial slipcase. First Folio Society edition.

In the spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) borrowed an axe from his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, walked to the shore of Walden Pond on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts, and began building a small one-room cabin. On Independence Day — the fourth of July — he moved in. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days, growing beans and keeping a journal and thinking about what it meant to live deliberately, attending only to what was essential and discarding what was not. He then left, returned to Concord, and spent the next seven years distilling his journal into Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, at forty-four, having published two books during his lifetime, neither of which sold particularly well.

The verdict of subsequent readers has been rather different. Walden is now understood as one of the foundational texts of American literature and of the global environmental movement — a work that anticipated, with uncomfortable precision, most of the arguments that would be made about industrial capitalism, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and the meaning of a life well spent over the century and a half following its publication. Its central argument is not that everyone should build a cabin in the woods, but that everyone should consider, with complete honesty, whether the life they are living is the life they actually want to be living. The question has not dated.

The photographs by Herbert W. Gleason (1855–1937) — naturalist, photographer, and long-time associate of the Thoreau Society — were made at Walden Pond and around Concord in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and represent the closest visual document we have to the landscape Thoreau inhabited. The twenty photographs reproduced in this edition, including two double-page fold-outs, bring the text's topography into focus with an intimacy that more recent photography of the area cannot recover. The map of Concord printed on the endpapers, also by Gleason, provides geographical orientation.

The introduction is by John Updike (1932–2009), who died in January 2009, the year of this edition's publication — making it among the last pieces of literary criticism he completed. Updike wrote about American literature with the authority of a practitioner who had spent his career in dialogue with the tradition Thoreau helped to establish.

Near fine. Some very faint foxing along fore-edge of volume. Slipcase shows very minor shelf wear. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000616