Im standing in front of the concorde Public Library where up next, curator Leslie Wilson will feature some of their specialcollections. The special collections started rolling when the library was founded in 1873 and it was part of the vision of the founder of the library, William Munro who set this place up specifically to collect local materials. He was very proud of concorde story and the literature and wanted to set up something that would both documents and do credit to the town. Because just 73 was right around the time tourism was beginning to take hold and people were coming to town and the library was essential public place where people could come and feel welcome and feel that they could get to understand the place they are visiting. We have major thoreau collections here at the concorde free Public Library and one of the tender pieces of the collection is the survey collection. The more iconic surveys we have in the collection is a survey of walden pond and 1846. And if you read walden recently you know that in a chapter the pond and winter he writes about surveying the pond and he writes about the process of doing that. He writes what he found in concrete terms. He raises it to metaphorical terms so he does that thing of bringing together the real and the metaphorical in a way that really specific to his writing. More than any of the other concrete authors and you can see here hes marked his house, and against the cabin. We like to call it a hot or a cabin but he called it a house on the survey. You can see the depth found things, you can see that teacher that fascinated him, repulsed him and fascinated him at the same time, the railroad so if youre taking the pittsford line these days, you still get that window of opportunity to look out over the pond for a second before it moves on to the concorde patient. One of the same famous major literary manuscripts that we have here is the essay walking which initially appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for june 1862 so this is one of those late life manuscripts that he was working to put together on his deathbed early in 1862 and he knew that he was dying. He wanted to leave as much material as possible ready for publication. He didnt really trust editors to take his material and work it, make it ready in a way that he would have approved of. And so he wanted to leave a good body of publishable material in order so one of the things that he was working on, he had done lectures on the subject of walking and on the subject of the wild and different periods of the 1850s and he had done, he had recorded a journal entry and thoughts on the subject so what hes essentially doing here is pulling together material from his lecture notes and material from his journals and making them ready to be published so what you see when you look at the first couple of lines is, i wish this evening is crossed out. You see the word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness and contrasted with the freedom and culture merely civil. So you see this is crossed out and its a giveaway that this is literally a page physically edited for publication. There are other points in the text where you can see the ads happening here in his hand. You can see a number of pages where this is his writing, this is someone elses handwriting. And so you have to remember that this is a deathbed production. He doesnt have the energy necessarily needs to sit there and copy long passages from his journal though hes relying on his sister whose judgment and accuracy he trusts and thats, they were very close family and so shes copying out long passages from the journal for him. Another page that is probably the most look at page in this manuscript area theres a very famous passage thats been the title of a Sierra Club Book and its something that shows up on mugs and tshirts and all kinds of commercial products derived from interest in thoreau its very moving for people who are here just to see something in his hand. To see a passage that is wellknown in his writing. The west is but another name for a while and what ive been preparing today is the wildness and the preservation of the world. Thats a thrilling manuscript in so many ways. One of the most exciting recent acquisitions that we had and a major example of how we can develop the collection we purchased is our recent acquisition of two major hunks of Louisa May Alcotts working manuscript of different books and this acquisition is particularly exciting for alcott scholars and for us at the library and other agencies in concorde that are interested in Louisa May Alcott because its very rare to find anything of this material in an archive, this working manuscript. Im not talking about personal papers although a lot of her personal papers dont survive because she herself destroyed quite a bit. But im talking about the working material and that has particular meaning for us here the cause as an archive, what we are seeking to do is develop elections that show the process of writing. Not the process of what people sometimes like to call treasures but material that tells a story and so when youve got working manuscripts, manuscripts with markings on it, manuscripts with printers markings on it, you get to tell multiple stories in a very exciting way. So what we have here are about, this is the sum total of the manuscript minus these pages so that we can look at them up close. Weve got about 90 some odd pages from eight cousins which was a book that was First Published in serial form in Saint Nicholas in the 1870s and published in book form in 1875 and then we got 400 plus pages from the manuscript of under the lilacs which was published again in Saint Nicholas serially and then in book form , this in 1878. So because Louisa May Alcott did not, theres not a great body of louisa may out working manuscripts that survive. She herself didnt want the material that was in perfect where people can see how much it had changed from beginning to end out there and she was very close about her personal papers. She just didnt wantmaterial circulating. At any rate, these two manuscripts together represent the largest intact of Louisa May Alcott manuscripts in the world so that gives this acquisition great importance in terms of alcott scholarship. These manuscripts also made sense in our collection because we had already two chapters of the working manuscript of little women and two chapters of the working manuscripts of little men and from my perspective, curatorial perspective, its so important to buy material or add material that meshes in some way with existing collections, its called building on strength so being able to add just major hunks of material to material we already had mixed this a very attractive acquisition for us. So i pulled one of the chapters of little women, we got a chapter called our foreign correspondent. Having this chapter sort of begs the question if the working manuscript got destroyed, how come you have this . And for this particular manuscript, the answer is on the back. Its in her handwriting, part of the manuscript of little women written in boston, saved my mothers desire so the little women was the book that kind of halted her into major authorship fame, recognition, success and really turn her life around in a lot of ways. Her mother recognized this and just wanted to capture a little souvenir of this great event in her daughters life. In additionto this material that these manuscripts put together , we also have a lot of later editions, later 19th century additions of little women with illustrations by a variety of wellknown illustrators. One of the most famous ones is the 1880 addition, published by robert brothers with illustrations by Frank Merrill who is a fairly wellknown boston area illustrator. What makes copies our interest in this edition specifically is the fact that we also have 60 some odd of merrills original pen and ink drawings for the addition. What makes a merrill illustration very interesting is on the back of some of them there are comments by Louisa May Alcott so shes had the chance to revert review merrills work and she has chosen to comments on how her characters are portrayed, some of them she likes, something he wants to see changes in but this tells the entire story of how engaged she was as a woman in control of her literary product. And the detail. In a way not unlike Henry Thoreau with the manuscript for his essay so the fact that this room, she writes questions, , she likes that one. On the back of this one and this is sort of you can see merrill has added Little Pencil eyeglass positions, you look at the printed text you can see the eyeglasses made it into the printed illustration. On the back of this one she writes capital, . This one she has a longer comment, she writes gloria looks very much older and in the other picture. About right here, and rather too young elsewhere. So she had definite ideas about how the character needed to look. Extended this one was where the severest out and paste it over, and mountains in the background seem to be sketched in in pencil, shes written l, meaning lori is rarely rather stiff in the legs. A few mountains or glimpse of the lake would add to the effect so she got what cf four and if you look at the book you can see the addition is in the new lori and up in the version in the book but again, its this interconnectedness, the feeling of material that is really what we do. Were not looking just to collect spots and as names, its got to be things that fit together and allow a good story to be told. Were at the old north bridge at Minuteman National historic park in concorde