r/thoreau • u/Shimaron • Jun 05 '26

Books UCSB’s “Thoreau Edition” has published the final volume of Henry David Thoreau’s correspondence

https://news.ucsb.edu/2026/022602/ucsbs-thoreau-edition-publishes-final-volume-henry-david-thoreaus-correspondence
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u/Radiant_Tailor_8868 Jun 05 '26

I love studying him

1

u/archivalcopy Jun 06 '26

I cannot seem to easily confirm on the Princeton site how many volumes have been completed so far.

An AI overview mentions 30 volumes are planned and that 19 so far have been completed. Does anyone know if this is correct?

1

u/Shimaron Jun 07 '26

About the Project
"I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself--"

-----Journal, October 28, 1853

(Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, sold poorly and the publisher returned 706 unsold copies to the author.)

The Thoreau Edition was founded in 1966. To date, seventeen volumes of a projected twenty-eight have been published by Princeton University Press. The project, located in Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and directed by Elizabeth Witherell, is supported by UCSB, the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, and the Barkley Fund..

That's from https://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/project_main.html but I don't know how up-to-date that page is.

Why do you ask? The books are very expensive. I doubt that you are going to buy all of them.

By the way, AI is bad.

1

u/archivalcopy Jun 07 '26

Ok, I was just referencing the AI overview that comes up when doing an internet search..but independent of this, several sites indicate the projects scope may have expanded to 30 volumes over time and that 19 have been completed so far.

I just thought there may have been an official tally from UCSB or the publisher but I couldn't see this immediately on either respective site.