Thoreau, as you may or may not know, wrote somewhere around a gazillion sentences. "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes," he wrote in 1853, "over 700 of which I wrote myself." Despite being prolific, though, Thoreau published just two books in his life: "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers." Subsequent efforts to assemble posthumous books from his trove of journals, letters, and essays were often haphazard.
So in 1966, a handful of scholars decided to put things right and publish a definitive edition of Thoreau's oeuvre. It would correct mistakes in earlier versions, serve up plenty of biographical and textual context, and present lots of unpublished material.
After 42 years, "The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau" project is halfway done. Thirty volumes are planned; the 15th has just been published. At this rate, it will take 39 years longer to produce the exhaustive edition of Thoreau's work than it did for Thoreau to live his life.
The new volume, "Excursions," contains nine of Thoreau's essays, written between 1842 and 1862. Only one, "The Landlord," is dull. The best are the exuberant "Natural History of Massachusetts"; the sweet "A Winter Walk"; a paean to going for walks called, simply enough, "Walking"; and a mildly arrogant speech Thoreau gave at a cattle fair explaining how oak forests can spring up where pine forests have been cut down, "An Address on the Succession of Forest Trees." At $65, "Excursions" is frighteningly expensive, but the edition reeks with judiciousness: Over half its pages are taken up with supporting material, compiled by editor Joseph J. Moldenhauer, and even readers who don't know Thoreau's work, or shudder at textual notes, will find plenty of interesting material inside.
Another important, long-dead essayist and naturalist had an interesting book reissued at the end of 2007 - Maurice Maeterlinck.
I know, Maeterlinck is not exactly a household name. But it used to be. The Belgian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 and was, for a while, one of the most widely read authors in the world. And yet, as his translator, Philip Mosley, notes, "It is revealing of current critical judgment that [Maeterlinck] is not included in a recent one-thousand-page encyclopedia of the essay as literary genre."
