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Areas of InterestWeb Paper Project Dickinson Concordance Dickinson & Humor H 157 Exploring Dickinson's variants Poems on this SiteSafe in their Alabaster Chambers PlayersLavinia Dickinson Mabel Loomis Todd Millicent Todd Bingham Martha Dickinson Bianchi Thomas H. Johnson R. W. Franklin Publishing HistoryCodes for Editions Annotated Timeline Fascicles MLT's Notebook Dickinson Stuff Home"Magic of Emily Dickinson" Site Index |
Fascicles"the term fascicle, of course, was not hers: Mabel Todd introduced it in Poems (1891)." (SB4). "In preparing a fascicle Emily Dickinson first copied poems onto sheets of stationery. The copying occurred before assembly or binding. Bibliographically, the fascicles may be described as folio in 2's in format, for the sheets, folded by the manufacturer to form two leaves, remained independent, not inserted inside each other" (Franklin, SB3).  "'Sewing' may not be a good term for what she did. It suggests an in-and-out motion, with the thread or string carried in a needle, whereas Dickinson made two holes from the same direction, inserted string through them, and tied it" (SB4). "The Editing of Emily Dickinson did not address the sequence within a fascicle.[note 26] Evidence to do so does exist, and for the facsimile edition the internal order of sheets, and thus of poems, was established for each bound fascicle. .... Soiling on first and last pages, for example, often identifies the first and last sheets of a group. Various links between sheets are provided by stains and their offsets onto facing pages, matching smudge patterns, pin impressions, and manufacturing defects like paper wrinkles. Special attention was given to puncture patterns of the binding holes and to stress effects caused by opening a fascicle against the tension of a stabbed binding, for they vary within fascicles: initial sheets differ from subsequent ones in amount of curvature along the fold edge and in the direction and extent of damage to the binding holes."(SB9) "Emily Dickinson's activity relating to the fascicles, 1858-1864, is tabulated in Fig. 1. For each year it shows the number of poems she copied onto fascicle sheets, the number of leaves copied, and the number of fascicles bound.29 A graph of this activity is provided in Fig. 2." (SB13).  Other aspects of their preparation argue against the fascicles as units constructed on some aesthetic principle. Dickinson used individual sheets of two leaves, not quires of leaves as in a notebook. If she had selected poems and arranged them into a meaningful order and then copied them onto fascicle sheets, the poems would have fallen across the four-page sheets without regard to spatial constraints. Instead we see her fitting poems to space. Her short poems (under eight lines), for example, would have appeared at various places on pages, but almost all were placed at the bottom to fill in after the preceding poem. Her longer poems, those taking three or four pages, would have started on any of the four pages of a Dickinson sheet if they had been part of a prior order (or, for that matter, if they had been randomly selected out of the mass before her). But almost all (19 of 22) began on the first page of a sheet, a point at which, conscious of the limits of her sheets, she knew there would be space to complete such a poem. Twice she began on the second page, once misjudging and running off the sheet onto an extra leaf. Once she began on the third page, also overrunning the limits of the sheet. None of the longer poems began on the fourth page. This pattern would not occur unless, working with the sheet as her unit, Dickinson had been fitting poems to space.34 (SB18) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-sb?id=sibv036&images=bsuva/sb/images&data=/texts/english/bibliog/SB&tag=public&part=1&division=div
"A few fascicles were already disordered by 1891, and for these the transcripts, made up to four years earlier than the notebook, were particularly helpful. Some distribution problems remained unresolved at the time The Editing of Emily Dickinson was published in 1967, notably the inclusion or exclusion of the sheets comprising packets 10 and 14 at the Houghton Library. Further research resolved these problems and corrected some related misjudgments. The changes have been reported in a series of articles" (SB 8).
___________ Franklin, R.W. "The Emily Dickinson Fascicles." Studies in Bilbiography, Edited by FREDSON BOWERS Volume Thirty-Six Published for Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia By The University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1983 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA Copyright © 1982 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia | |