Inscribed by Alcott to Benjamin Marston Watson.  Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, University of South Carolina.

Alcott’s Emerson was prepared for Emerson’s sixty-second birthday on May 25, 1865, for which occasion fifty copies were privately printed.

This copy of the 1865 private printing—inscribed by Alcott for Benjamin Marston Watson of Plymouth, Massachusetts—comes from the Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature.  Watson was intimately connected to the Concord literary circle as the husband of Lidian Emerson’s childhood friend Mary Russell, as Waldo Emerson’s advisor on horticulture, as a longtime supporter of Bronson Alcott, and as Thoreau’s Harvard classmate and friend, all of which makes this a delightful association copy.  Joel Myerson bought the book from George Goodspeed when Goodspeed’s shop was on Beacon Street in Boston.  Writes Myerson: “I always stopped by to chat with George when I was in Boston, and, after a suitable amount of time, he’d pull a book from a shelf that he’d ‘saved’ for me, and I knew if I failed to purchase it, there would never be a book on his shelf with my name on it again.”

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