Books

Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891. First edition. original cloth. Very Good. FIRST EDITION, one of only 960 copies printed. A beautiful copy. When Emily Dickinson died in 1886, very few people knew of the existence of her poetry. After her death, however, her sister Lavinia discovered a box of manuscript poems by Dickinson and immediately recognized their value. Determined that the public should not be deprived of Dickinson's poetry, Lavinia enlisted the help of her sister's friends, the literary scholar Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (her brother's mistress) to edit and publish the poems. The first volume, Poems, appeared in 1890 in an extremely limited run of only 500 copies. It was received favorably, encouraging Higginson and Todd to prepare more works for publication. As Todd explains in the Preface to this, the first edition of the "Second Series" of poems: "The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson's poems has been read shows very…