Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson

Presented in two volumes, a beautiful facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s celebrated hand-sewn manuscript books.Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems, but published only a handful during her lifetime. Most were preserved in manuscript form, a testament to the editorial process of a strikingly original poet. Her first drafts, jotted on odd scraps of paper, were generally discarded when transcribed. Completed poems were neatly copied in ink on sheets of folded stationery, then sewn together into small manuscript books known as fascicles. After Dickinson’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered forty of these fascicles carefully stored among her papers.This elegant two-volume edition presents all of Dickinson’s manuscript books and unsewn fascicle sheets—1,148 poems on 1,250 pages—restored insofar as possible to their original order, as they were when Lavinia found them. The manuscripts are reproduced with startling fidelity, preserving every detail: the bosses on the stationery, sewing holes and tears, variants and penciled revisions, ink spots and other stains, and later markings by Susan Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd, and others.Accompanied by an informative introduction, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson brings readers as close as possible to experiencing Dickinson's poetry in its original form.