On this day in 1853 Henry David Thoreau received back from his publisher the 706 unsold copies of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Only 1000 copies had been published four years earlier, at the author's own expense. In his journal entry for this day, the ever-resilient Thoreau recorded these reflections upon his "purchase":
They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin.... I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ... FULL STORY »
