When You’re Preparing a Letterpress Edition…

The morning after one of my book talks in Maine last summer (2024), I received a call from Scott Vile at Ascensius Press. He hadn’t been able to attend the previous night but wanted to have coffee, and we met at a place across the street from the Portland Public Library. There I learned who he was—not just a 28-year member of the Society of Printers, a 15-year member of the Club of Odd Volumes, and a 30-year member of Portland’s Baxter Society (president for five years), but currently Printer to the Club of Odd Volumes, a position held in its 132-year history by only five previous members. Ok, that’s all from his website (he didn’t brag). But he did admit he was the figure behind Maine History, Maine Historical Society’s beautiful journal, and other MHS publications, and an artist who back in 1998, printed a gorgeous letterpress, boxed edition of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, which includes, of course, Thoreau’s writings on Katahdin. When he got to that part, I knew where he was going. “So I was thinking,” he said,” of doing a kind of companion edition to the Thoreau volume, with Oakes Smith’s Katahdin journey.”

I must have stammered something about how great that would be, but I know whatever I said, it probably wasn’t cool. Oakes Smith’s friend John Neal told me, back in the 1820s, to Keep Cool, but no…

Thing is, Vile had read my work, and he’d read the Maine Memory edition of Oakes Smith’s narrative, and saw that I’d used the their typescript to prepare the section on her memoir in volume I of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Selected Writings. And he had some questions. There were some likely typos in that typescript—were they in the original, or had they entered the text in typescript?—and there were syntactic errors. Had I looked at the original copies of the Portland Daily Advertiser from 1849?

When you’re preparing a letterpress edition, well, yeah—you make sure you’ve verified the accuracy of the text as much as possible (I think he said the Thoreau edition, boxed, in full calf, went for thousands a copy). So I was on the spot now. Never one to let the grass grow under my feet, when our coffee was done I headed straight over to the Portland Room, the rare books room at the Portland Public Library, where I acquired first the microfilm of the Portland Daily Advertiser for August 1849, and later, the original in paper. In the end, I think we got it right.

As I argue in the Foreword to this edition (forthcoming summer 2025), in the end, Vile’s super-high standards had at least three important consequences. First, it’s pretty clear that Oakes Smith’s climb of Katahdin was part of her inspiration to risk her commercial success by turning to political activism, and Vile’s volume will only call more attention to that crucial turning point. Second, and more materially, this printer’s perfectionist eye inspired the return to the original newspaper publication of Oakes Smith’s—which led to the discovery of typographical errors in the Maine Memory network’s typescript copy of Oakes Smith’s narrative. Closer study of some broken syntax in this commonly-used typescript showed that the microfilm copy of The Daily Advertiser on which the typist relied was photographed from a folded copy of the newspaper where two important lines in a column—in fact, right at the point Oakes Smith records her view from the summit—were occluded. Thus Vile’s will be the first correct edition of the narrative ever published.

Finally, preparation for this edition inspired further research—specifically, to see if indeed, Oakes Smith “never mentioned her excursion” in her autobiography or elsewhere—something claimed by Eliza Richards in a biographical entry on Oakes Smith but also something I repeated dutifully in the introduction the Katahdin memoir in volume I of The Selected Writings. Sure enough, forgotten in my files I discovered a column written for the New York Home Journal: an autobiographic “memory” from 1868 where Oakes Smith revised her original narrative in minor but interesting ways.