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The manuscript books Emily Dickinson constructed of her poems, known to us as fascicles or packets, have had so long a history of physical disruption and piecemeal publication that nearly a century after her death we are just coming to understand them. To Lavinia Dickinson, who discovered them after her sister's death, and to the early editors (1890-1945), they were only a source for poems, organized in other ways for publication. Thomas H. Johnson was the first to attempt to account for them, and in the variorum edition (1955) his notes recorded packet numbers for poems.[1] He had rearranged many of the fascicles that by then were in disarray, but the reordering was incomplete, and the edition, arranged differently, obscured actual order. Although in 1967, in The Editing of Emily Dickinson, I addressed the question of which sheets belonged to each fascicle, several problems remained unresolved. Shortsightedly, I did not attempt to establish the sequence within fascicles, and, to be sure, the following year Ruth Miller introduced us to new ways of thinking about them—as artistic gatherings in which not only the set of sheets but their sequence is of critical importance.[2] Despite Thomas Johnson's work, my own, and that of Ruth Miller, until recently we have had no satisfactory lists of the poems as Dickinson bound them and no edition that presented them in a manner convenient for fascicle study. Badly hampered, interest in these manuscript books nevertheless has continued.[3]
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which I recently edited, may be considered the fascicles' first edition.[4] They were restored as far
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