“BUT TRUTH IS SIMPLE, AND WILL NOT BE ANTIQUE: IS EVER PRESENT, AND INSISTS ON BEING OF THIS AGE, AND OF THIS MOMENT”: EMERSON’S ILLUSTRATED COMPLETE WORKS, FINELY BOUND WITH EXCEPTIONAL ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LEAF

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo. Complete Works. Twelve volumes. WITH: Journals. Ten volumes. WITH: COOKE, George Willis. A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1903-04, 1909-14, 1908. Together, twenty-three volumes. Octavo, contemporary three-quarter green morocco, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt, uncut and mostly unopened.

“Autograph Centenary” edition of Emerson's Works, together with his Journals, each one of 600 copies, illustrated with 56 photogravures, with original manuscript leaf in Emerson’s hand from his essay "The Preacher" mounted in Volume I of the Complete Works.

This edition includes all of Emerson's poems, lectures, biographical sketches, letters, and his famous essays, several of which are here printed for the first time. Their "ethical inspiration and stimulation, their occasional startling phrase, their individualistic idealism, which stirred renascent Yankee New England to its depths, speaks with the same simple power and force in the midst of modern complexities" (Grolier, American 100 47). The manuscript leaf reads, "It does appear that people make life hard and unlovely by theology. And live a disagreeable dream thereby they have inherited some dogma from the last or older generations which their fathers borrowed partly from the pagan and partly from the early Xtians and a natural reverence for antiquity, which they do not think themselves, engages them to repeat and to urge it now. It has been corrected by their own irresistible experience, and is nothing so horrible as it once was. But truth is simple, and will not be antique: is ever present, and insists on being of this age, and of this moment. Here is thought and truth and duty and love, new as on the first day of Adam or of Angels. And if, instead of walking with our heads turned backwards…" Much of the material has been crossed out by Emerson, but most of the last third appears word for word in Emerson's essay "The Preacher," printed here in Volume X, page 237. The Works are number 456 of 600 copies, and are signed in Volume I by the publisher; the Journals are number 235 of 600 sets of the Large Paper Edition. Uniformly bound; also includes George Willis Cooke's bibliography of Emerson's works, which is number 458 of 530 copies.

Spines toned to brown. A beautiful set in fine condition.