First Edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden, First edition


	"No truer American existed than Thoreau." -Emerson

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only."

"Still we live meanly, like ants... it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and inevitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!"

"His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions and strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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THOREAU, Henry David. Walden; or Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. Octavo, original brown blind-stamped cloth. $12,500.

First edition, one of only 2000 copies printed, of one of the great American celebrations of individualism and self-reliance. With map of Walden pond after p.306 and catalogue of publisher's ads dated "May 1854". (Copies were issued with ads with various dates; according to BAL, the date of the ads are "of no known bibliographical significance".) Some soiling to cloth, slight wear to spine ends; gilt bright. Early owner signature, occasional underlining in pencil. An excellent copy in original cloth of a rare and fragile book.

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