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The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (2 Volume Set)

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THE MANUSCRIPT BOOKS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 2 vols, 1442 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981. ISBN 0-674-54828-0 (hbk.)

What do we mean when we speak of "an Emily Dickinson poem" ? If you think about it, we could mean one of at least five different things. We may be referring :

(1) to her poems as they are found in her original manuscripts;

(2) to their photographic facsimiles as in the present edition;

(3) to the Variorum editions of Thomas H. Johnson or R. W. Franklin which attempt to get over into typographic form as much as they can of her highly idiosyncratic manuscript drafts - with all of their variants and their peculiarities of line breaks, spacing, punctuation, and of alternate words about which she never made up her mind but placed neatly alongside or beneath many of her poems;

(4) to the reader's editions of Johnson and Franklin which offer what these Dickinson scholars and expert editors feel is _one_ (of many possible) sensible and acceptable readings out of the mass of variants;

(5) or finally we may be referring to her poems as altered, revised, regularized, tidied-up and smoothed out so as to be made to look more 'normal' and acceptable to ordinary readers. At this fifth and furthest remove from ED's own drafts, we are given a text by a towering genius as modified by someone who was far less than a genius, and who has usually damaged the poem in various ways.

The present 2-volume set of 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' brings us as close to the real thing as most of us will ever get. It gives us photographic facsimiles, with full scholarly apparatus, not of all of her poems but of those she bound into forty fascicles, tiny hand-stitched manuscript-books that she squirreled away in her room and that were not to be discovered until after her death many years later.

Here you can see how her strange handwriting changed radically over the years. Here you can see all of the peculiarities of her spelling. Here you can see all those little asterisks which she used to indicate an alternate word elsewhere on the page, usually at the foot. Here you can also see all of her line breaks and her idiosyncrasies of spacing, both of which are often highly significant. Here, in a word, you can see the hand of a genius at work.

Personally I think we are extremely fortunate to have these two volumes, and that all lovers of ED's amazing poems, poems that are one of the wonders of the world, should be grateful to R. W. Franklin for the arduous labors that must have gone into his impeccable edition, an edition with full scholarly apparatus that provides a wealth of fascinating information about the forty fascicles.

The two large, heavy and sturdy volumes are stitched, bound in half cloth, beautifully printed on a very strong, smooth, ivory tinted paper that we are told is the finest paper in the world and I can well believe it, and they come in a buckram-covered box.

It's clear that no pains have been spared to give us, not only accurate and annotated photographic facsimiles of every page of the Manuscript Books, but also to give them to us in sturdy and beautiful volumes that are a fitting vehicle for the works of the amazing woman we know as Emily Dickinson. How astounded and gratified she would have been to have seen this set, a set that would warm the heart of any bibliophile, and that belongs in the collection of all Dickinson enthusiasts.

Since Gutenberg, we have fixed our attention on the regularity of type, of perfectly redundant print. This digitization of written expression is not without cost. Our tendency with print is to forget the material form of the expression, its path in reaching us, and the clues available in the holographic. Still we value the signature and the written note from an intimate. ED's compositions depend in part upon the concrete aspects -- visual and expressive -- of her particular inscriptions. These are as variable and ambiguous as her syntax and equally worth the effort to decode. Take a poem you already know and love and read it in manuscript: yet another delight will emerge.

If you missed a chance to buy this invaluable Dickinson resource the first time around, don't despair. It is available once again from Harvard University Press as a hardcover, print-on-demand title ($[...]). The type font, illustrations, and paper opacity are identical to that of the first edition, but the bindings may differ somewhat. For Dickinson enthusiasts and scholars alike, it is a great way to obtain this indispensible set at a reasonable price. See the details at: [...]