Thoreau's Essays

[Vince]

I’m starting work on an omnibus of Thoreau’s essays. In keeping with our short fiction omnibuses, I’m just calling “Essays” unless/until I hear different.

[Vince]

In his essay on wild apples, Thoreau goes a little crazy with his “taxonomy” of the various apples. In this paragraph, only a few are real taxonomy names, the others appear to be made up or word-plays (limacea is “a natural group comprising the terrestrial slugs”). Searches for them only find hits in various versions of this essay.

The real taxonomy get the appropriate tags, of course. What about the other ones? Just leave them unsemanticated <i>’s, or use a language of “und” or an x-TAG, or…?

[Alex Cabal]

You can still use taxonomy. Even though they're fake, they're meant to
look like taxonomies.

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[Vince]

All right, I believe Thoreau’s Essays is ready for review. This one turned into a fair bit of work.

A few notes (most noted in production notes as well):

1. Two of the essays noted in Emma’s original email, “After the Death of John Brown” and “Homer Ossian Chaucer”, had no transcriptions, so I typed them from the scans. A third, “Martyrdom of John Brown”, is just another name for “After the Death”.
2. I added a preface that is a short (20 page) biographical sketch of Thoreau written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is from Excursions, a collection of Thoreau’s nature essays published shortly after his death, and seems very applicable and appropriate to me. It’s easy enough to take out if you disagree.
3. A couple of the essays, “Thomas Carlyle” in particular, were missing large chunks of text from their original publication. “Carlyle” was missing 4K words, a third of the essay. I typed these in from the original scans as well. (All of the above were proofread side-by-side with the scans after the typing.)
4. “A Yankee in Canada” was previously published as a standalone SE production. I combined the chapters into one file to match the rest of the essays, and labeled it the same as the rest. It is roughly the size of “Chesuncook,” so I didn’t think that was inappropriate.
5. I also re-used the cover art from “A Yankee in Canada,” as it is apropos for many of the nature essays as well as “Yankee”.
6. Modernize spelling makes changes, but they’re all to poems/verse, so I did not include them.
7. I included bridgeheads on each essay indicating when and where it was first published; a couple of them had this information already.
8. The order is written order, which occasionally differs from publication order; e.g. “The Service” was written in 1840 but not published until after his death.

[Vince]

Alex, no rush, I just want to make sure you saw this.

[Alex Cabal]

Great work, I've gone ahead and released it! Thanks!

On 5/2/21 4:51 PM, Vince wrote:
> All right, I believe Thoreau’s Essays

> <https://github.com/vr8hub/henry-david-thoreau_essays> is ready for

> review. This one turned into a fair bit of work.
>
> A few notes (most noted in production notes as well):
>

> 1. Two of the essays noted in Emma’s original email, “After the Death

> of John Brown” and “Homer Ossian Chaucer”, had no transcriptions, so
> I typed them from the scans. A third, “Martyrdom of John Brown”, is
> just another name for “After the Death”.

> 2. I added a preface that is a short (20 page) biographical sketch of
> Thoreau written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is from /Excursions/, a

> collection of Thoreau’s nature essays published shortly after his
> death, and seems very applicable and appropriate to me. It’s easy
> enough to take out if you disagree.

> 3. A couple of the essays, “Thomas Carlyle” in particular, were missing

> large chunks of text from their original publication. “Carlyle” was
> missing 4K words, a third of the essay. I typed these in from the
> original scans as well. (All of the above were proofread
> side-by-side with the scans after the typing.)

> 4. “A Yankee in Canada” was previously published as a standalone SE

> production. I combined the chapters into one file to match the rest
> of the essays, and labeled it the same as the rest. It is roughly
> the size of “Chesuncook,” so I didn’t think that was inappropriate.

> 5. I also re-used the cover art from “A Yankee in Canada,” as it is

> apropos for many of the nature essays as well as “Yankee”.

> 6. Modernize spelling makes changes, but they’re all to poems/verse, so

> I did not include them.

> 7. I included bridgeheads on each essay indicating when and where it

> was first published; a couple of them had this information already.

> 8. The order is written order, which occasionally differs from

> publication order; e.g. “The Service” was written in 1840 but not
> published until after his death.
>

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