Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“Emily Dickinson now stands with Walt Whitman as one of America’s two preeminent poets of the 19th century and perhaps of our whole literary tradition” (ANB).

Dickinson published only 11 poems during her lifetime, and even these were published anonymously and likely without her consent. She wrote steadily, however, circulating poems among family and friends and cultivating friendships with other writers. One such friend, Helen Hunt Jackson, volunteered to serve as her literary executor, telling her, “you are such a great poet - and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.”

After Emily’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered a locked box containing a trove of 1,775 manuscript poems. She enlisted Mabel Todd to edit and publish a volume of these poems in 1890. The response was so positive and the demand so overwhelming that 11 editions were run off in the next year, along with a Second Series of poems in 1891, followed by a Third Series in 1896.

Dickinson’s poems are her “letter to the world,’ records of the life about her, of tiny ecstacies set in motion by mutations of the seasons or by home and garden incidents, of candid insights into her own states of conciousness, and of speculations on the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind was charged with paradox” (Hart, 108-9).

The first edition of the first volume of Dickinson’s poems is particularly rare, as only 500 copies were printed. The Second and Third Series are also quite scarce: only 960 copies of the Second and 1000 copies of the Third were published. We are pleased to offer first editions, first printings of all three volumes, a landmark in American poetry.