Well-Read Life™

The Lost Maps of Henry David Thoreau: A New Way of Reading America’s Best-Known Woodsman

“After years of wondering and having nearly given up on finding Thoreau’s copies of the Champlain maps, a colleague pointed out to me that the Library of Congress had obtained, in the early 1970s, several manuscript maps that were thought to possibly have been drawn by Thoreau. Not expecting much (I knew that the Library had 5.5 million maps in thousands of drawers), I went to the case that contained this group of manuscripts….I could not believe what I was looking at….”

With these words John Hessler, the Senior Cartographic Librarian in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, reveals a Thoreau that was, for most of us, as hidden as those maps. The famous Walden Pond writer as mapmaker? Who knew?

John did, thankfully, and he indeed found the two 17th-century maps by Champlain that Thoreau copied with his own hand and annotated. John also discovered four pages of related notes by Thoreau.

John’s story of the maps—their connection to Cape Cod and their larger significance—is part of the fascinating new material in our Levenger Press book, Henry David Thoreau On Cape Cod: His Journeys and the Lost Maps. A lovingly abridged reprise of Thoreau’s Cape Cod, it’s published together for the first time with the full-color, unbound facsimiles of the Thoreau maps and notes (they are neatly folded and nestled in a pocket inside the back cover).  

Mim Harrison, our editor of Levenger Press, had a chance to talk with John about this new way of reading Thoreau. I think you’ll like these highlights of their conversation.

—Steve

Levenger Press: What was it like to discover Thoreau’s two lost maps?

John Hessler: Thoreau was always an author who meant a great deal to me. I started seriously reading his journals while doing research in the Alps on high-altitude alpine biogeography. His way of describing things, places and landscapes interested me. Later, when I found out he was a mapmaker, I understood more of what attracted me to him. Discovering his maps was, for me, uncovering another layer in the work of an author that I had come to think of as a model for some of my own work. As far as its importance to Thoreau scholarship—any new manuscript is an important discovery. These maps certainly open up new territory for scholars to explore.

LP: How did Thoreau copy Champlain’s maps?

John: One of the things that people do not realize about Thoreau—and this is very much due to his mythic status as an outdoorsman—is that he spent a great deal of time in libraries. As an alum of Harvard College he obtained borrowing privileges, and would often make the short trip from Concord to Cambridge. Most of the maps he drew appear to have been copied from books in the Harvard Library. Some of Thoreau's maps are only rough sketches, but others, like the two Champlain maps in the Levenger book, are more expertly drafted, showing that he certainly had some mapmaking talent.

LP: On the larger of the two maps, Thoreau appears to be correcting Champlain with annotations in red ink. Was Thoreau accurate?

John: Thoreau had a real sense of geographic history. He did not necessarily strive for accuracy, but rather wanted to understand how the geography of particular places changed over time. This is reflected in the lists of the different names of places that he collected in his notebooks, and in the red annotations on the 1612 map by Champlain. We can see in this activity a writer who was really one of the first cartographic historians. Thoreau was using maps to look at what happened in the past, not to define a present.

LP: How were maps used in America in Thoreau’s day? Were they more important than now?

John: Maps, to a certain extent, were not necessarily the wayfinding tools they are now. They tended to describe a territory in order to outline what a particular geographical region looked like, and who ruled over it. The maps that Thoreau used and copied are these types of maps. They show coastlines, important locations, Indian territories and new discoveries. They are nationalistic, calling places by names like “New France” and “New England.” Thoreau was always critical of wayfinding maps, such as the ones he used during his trips to the Maine woods, and typically found them to be inaccurate as directional aids—“labyrinths of error,” as he called them.

LP: You also found four pages of notes about the two Champlain maps as well as others that Thoreau studied. How did you determine the notes were written by Thoreau?

John: Over the years I have spent a great deal of time looking at Thoreau manuscripts and have become quite familiar with his characteristic paleography. As soon as I saw the handwriting, I knew it could only have been his. Knowing it was his and reading it are, however, two different things. His writing is more difficult to interpret than that found on many of the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts I typically work with. It took some time to figure out what he was saying on those four small pages.

LP:  The maps and notes have never been published for the general public until now. What do you think they add to the reading experience?

John: Thoreau has become an icon of American letters. Famous figures from very different cultural backgrounds—personalities like Gandhi and Martin Luther King—claim to have been inspired by his writings. He has also become a somewhat mythic figure in the environmental movement. I think that Thoreau’s mapmaking and note-taking show us another side of the man, one less mythic and more like ourselves. He was a person who liked to walk, to observe, to read and to investigate his world: not necessarily to change it, but simply to understand it for himself.

LP: You write in your commentary that all Thoreau’s books are rooted in a place. Do you think that’s because he was harboring mapmaking tendencies all along?

John: I think place was a very important concept in early 19th-century America. We were a young republic, and had not yet come to terms with what this land was and how it would evolve. Things seemed limitless, but limitlessness can result in a feeling of ungroundedness. It can evoke a desire to understand a limited region and to settle down in a place. Thoreau's mapmaking is an extension of this attempt to fully understand a particular place, the northeastern United States.

LP: What do you think Thoreau would make of today’s GPS?

John: One of the things that Thoreau talks about in relation to maps is how once an area is mapped, it loses some of its mystery and becomes much less interesting. In his journals he says this about some of the woodlots and forests that he surveyed around Concord. I think he would find our desire to quantify everything, to leave nothing to chance discovery, to be a loss. It was Thoreau who said, “how little there is on an ordinary map.” What he meant by this is that while a map showed the boundaries, the roads and the buildings, it left out the actual lives of people, the scenery, and all of the things that make human existence interesting. For Thoreau facts were important, but facts, no matter how detailed, could never completely describe the poetics of human history and place.

And now to you, dear reader: Does the idea of finding new ways to read famed writers like Thoreau appeal to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

—Steve

Ross King’s da Vinci code: a new reading on Leonardo, and how Leonardo read

We’re  more than proud to say that Levenger Press has just published a new work by bestselling author Ross King, The Fantasia of Leonardo da Vinci: His riddles, jests, fables and bestiary. I know many readers are fans of Ross, as am I—I loved both his Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling and Brunelleschi’s Dome.

In The Fantasia, Ross introduces us not to the artist Leonardo but to the writer and reader. And he shows us Leonardo off camera—the view that only scholars like Ross have really known, until now. Here’s some of our recent conversation with Ross about the genius who called himself “an unlettered man” and had a huge distrust of “infinite children.”

—Steve

Levenger Press: How did Leonardo combine what was on the page with what was happening in the streets around him for his writing?

Ross King: Leonardo was a great observer of the world around him. We’re told he always kept tucked in his belt a little notebook in which he jotted down anything that amused or interested him. He also used to follow people through the streets of Florence or Milan, surreptitiously making sketches of their features with a view to using them in paintings. And, of course, he made meticulous drawings of the bodies he dissected, as well as of the machines he planned to build.  That said, Leonardo also valued what he found in books.

LP:  Is there any connection between what he drew and what he read?

Ross: What is probably Leonardo’s most famous drawing – the nude man with his arms and legs outspread – was based on the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.

LP: Would the books in Leonardo’s library have been illustrated?

Ross: Leonardo himself worked as a book illustrator, since he did the illustrations for his friend Luca Pacioli’s Divine Proportion, which was published in 1509. Hand-illuminated books or manuscripts, however, would have been far too expensive for Leonardo. Only wealthy families, such as the Medici, could afford them. But a number of his books would have been illustrated with woodcuts. Woodcut illustration was a fairly new technology, but in the fifteenth century Florence was a center for it. One of the books he owned, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, had woodcut illustrations. Also, most editions of Aesop printed after 1480 – and Leonardo owned one of those as well – included charming woodcuts.

LP:   Did Leonardo mean for his own fables and bestiary to be published?

Ross: I’m sure he did. He clearly had plans to print and publish numerous books of his own, both scientific treatises and more diverting books such as his bestiary. He was an inveterate writer. We now have almost 6,000 pages of his notes and drawings – and this is less than half of the papers he wrote in his lifetime. Unfortunately, Leonardo seldom finished things he started, and he never saw any of his works through the printing press.

LP: What was a bestiary, and why were they a popular form of allegory?

Ross: A bestiary is a “book of beasts,” a collection of stories giving allegorical descriptions of animal behavior. Bestiaries were popular because they were treasure troves of animal lore, and they were often highly amusing to read. They were also popular because they could be used as vehicles for moral and religious teaching. Furthermore, they were used to teach children to read. Leonardo owned a bestiary called the Fior di Virtù (“Flower of Virtue”). This may have been one of the first books he ever learned to read.

LP: Did Leonardo like animals in the flesh, as well as in allegory?

Ross: Leonardo was one of history’s great animal lovers. He was said by one of his earliest biographers, Giorgio Vasari, to love the whole of the animal kingdom, and to treat all living creatures “with wonderful love and patience” – a very rare thing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Vasari describes how Leonardo used to buy caged birds and release them into the air. He was also, for at least part of his life, a vegetarian, refusing to eat anything that contained blood.

LP: Do we know how Leonardo physically read? Did he try to read his books in the mirror way that he wrote?

Ross: I think it’s unlikely in the extreme that he read books by means of a mirror. His major problem in reading books was his lack of expertise in Latin. He famously called himself an uomo senza lettere – an “unlettered man.” By that I think he meant that he was a disciple of experience, not books – which is not strictly true. But he didn’t have the qualification that all “lettered” men had: a good knowledge of Latin. He may have studied some Latin as a child, since his father was a notary, but he didn’t really begin studying Latin seriously until he was in his late 30s. He probably never really achieved a great proficiency.

LP: How do you think he would feel about e-books? Would the animal-rights/vegan in him applaud the absence of vellum?

Ross: I suspect that Leonardo, who loved invention, would have embraced technology such as e-books, especially if it meant saving the lives of animals. Many books in Leonardo’s day were made from vellum—the skins of calves, lambs and kids. He deplored the slaughter of these creatures and believed, unlike virtually all of his contemporaries, that animals had souls.

LP: As a man of invention, he must have applauded the printing press.

Ross: Strangely, Leonardo was suspicious of printed books and the printing press. He distrusted a process, such as printing, that produced what he called “infinite children” without differentiation between original and copy. I suspect he would have preferred his works to appear in manuscript form rather than by means of moveable type.

LP: What would have been the inspiration for his riddles?

Ross: Riddles were a popular form of amusement at European royal courts, where poets and jesters matched wits against one another for the amusement of kings and courtiers. Leonardo was part of this long tradition, since he used to divert and amuse the courtiers in Milan with riddles and stories. The inspiration for these riddles came from the world around him – and, very often, from his disgust at its senselessness and violence. Many of his riddles cast a light on man’s cruelty to man, and especially to animals.

LP: Would any of his friends have been able to guess the answers?

Ross: Some of them, certainly. One of his friends and fellow riddlers was the great architect Donato Bramante. Another friend was the mathematician Luca Pacioli. It’s hard to imagine even Leonardo stumping such brilliant minds.

LP: What’s your favorite Leonardo riddle?

Ross: “Men will walk and not stir, they will talk to those who are not present, and hear those who do not speak.”

LP:  Should we tell our readers the answer?

Ross: I wouldn’t dream of withholding it.

Care to share your thoughts on Leonardo as a reader? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

—Steve