Writings & Life Without Principle Manuscript Leaf Edition by Henry David Thoreau - 1906

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. first edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Near Fine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Near Fine. Numbered 217/600, 20 volume set by Houghton Mifflin (signed by publisher) and issued with an inset leaf of original manuscript from Life without Principle. Unlike most manuscript sets, this has an iconic leaf: several of the most memorable passages (over 350 words in ink and pencil) from Thoreau's famous essay Life Without Principle. "Sometimes regarded as Thoreau's best, most concentrated statement of his major message, his equivalent of Emerson's Self-Reliance." (Richardson 333). The esays was written in 1854, at the time Walden was being published. Thoreau anticipated getting lecture invitations based on Walden, and this was to be his most important statement on work, money, and the purpose of life. Thoreau finished revisions of the essay (including on this leaf) very near his death. The passages in this leaf are justly famous: "The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is the most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. [Paragraph break] As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. [Paragraph break] The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. [Paragraph break] [unpublished] Commonly, if a temple is to be built, the work goes to the lowest bidder. It would be wiser to give it to the highest bidder. The question is not how the work may be well, only cheaply done. [pencil] But the fault is as much with workers as with employers. [paragraph break] [In pencil] If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day and see his fellows [illegible phrase] he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen." In The Literary Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau, William Howarth explains that Houghtin Mifflin purchased "bundles of loose manuscripts, already used by printers in making some of Thoreau's earliest volumes." Not surprisingly, most of the these manuscripts were from the Journal, four volumes of which Houghtin Mifflin had already published in its "seasons" series (spring, summer, autumn, winter). Sets with book or essay manuscript pages are thus scarcer, and sets with quotable manuscript passages are rarest of all. The 20 volume set itself is bound in the usual buckram with minor wear. The paper labels on the spines have some chipping, but the contents are beautifully clean. The leaf is clean and pristine, not a hint of wear. An extremely desirable leaf in a set crying out for a fine binding.