29 BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 30THOREAU, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Boston and Cambridge, 1849. Octavo, original brown cloth gilt, custom slipcase. $25,000 First Edition Of Thoreau’s First Book First edition, first issue, of Thoreau’s first book, one of only 1000 copies printed and one of less than 400 copies in the publisher’s cloth, a beautiful copy from the famed collection of Arthur Swann. In residence at Walden Pond, “Thoreau’s first concentrated effort (was) to assemble, flesh out, and then rearrange material about the trip he and (his brother) John had taken on the Concord and Merrimack rivers… in August and September of 1842… A Week literally evolved from Thoreau’s materials at hand… It is the first of the many American books shaped along a river trip, the first in which the river becomes a stream, not just of water or even of time, but of consciousness itself” (Richardson, 155). Despite some good reviews, the first edition (consisting of one thousand copies) did not sell. In 1862, the remainder of 595 copies of the first edition were bought from Thoreau by Ticknor and Fields and rebound with a new title page bearing their imprint. With the bookplate of Arthur Swann. Swann’s collection, known for the excellence of its copies, was auctioned in 1960 at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York. In the catalogue for the auction, this copy is described as “an unusually fine copy.” A few contemporary ink marks to text block fore-edge, lower front joint with an expert cloth repair. A beautiful copy. “There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.”
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