The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Autograph Centenary Edition.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo.

$8,200.00

Item Number: 137099

Cambridge: Printed at the Riverside Press, 1903.

The Autograph Centenary edition of Emerson’s complete works with an autograph manuscript in his hand and with his notations tipped in. One of six hundred copies additionally signed by the publisher, this is number 576. Octavo, 12 volumes bound in three quarter morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, illustrated with photogravures including tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Emerson. Tipped into volume I, the manuscript in Emerson’s hand reads in part, “He repeats after Plato the affirmations of real essence. There is not any life in those things which are not eternal life. Life which is not eternal is not life but in a little while perishes nor can To Be be predicated on those things which cease to Be and of those which never cease to be.” In near fine condition.

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. This edition of the Complete Works includes all of Emerson’s poems, lectures, biographical sketches, letters, and his famous essays, several of which are here printed for the first time. Their "ethical inspiration and stimulation, their occasional startling phrase, their individualistic idealism, which stirred renascent Yankee New England to its depths, speaks with the same simple power and force in the midst of modern complexities" (Grolier, American 100 47).