The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. IV (2026), title page and table of contents

Notes:

All material in this edition is protected by copyright, exclusively held by the estate of the author. Permission has been obtained by the Poe Society of Baltimore from Mabbott's estate to provide this electronic edition for academic and research purposes only. The Poe Society of Baltimore asks all users of this material to respect these copyrights, and not to exceed what would typically be considered as fair use (generally interpreted as selective quotations and/or paraphrasing of only a small percentage of the total material, and with the appropriate attribution and citation).

Although Poe's writings are essentially in the public domain, the texts presented here embody often painstaking editorial work by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, and that editorial work is protected by copyright. The introductory material, descriptions, annotations, and the apparatus of texts and variants are Mabbott's original work, and are even more clearly subject to copyright.

Thomas Ollive Mabbott planned to include a volume dedicated to “The Literati of New York City” as part of his Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, the original working title for the set, largely intended as an expansion and refinement of the 17-volume collection of the same name edited by James A. Harrison in 1902. Sometime prior to about 1954, James B. Reece (1920-1985) was included in the effort for this volume, presumably as Mabbott was realizing the practical need of involving more people in assisting him to finally realize an enormous project that had already stretched out for decades. About this time, Reece was preparing his own doctoral thesis on Poe and New York Literati (Duke University). Only the volume of Poems was sufficiently complete for Mabbott to review about half of the proofs before his death in 1968.

One of the volumes left incomplete, but with many substantial pages of notes among his papers, was the material based on “The Literati of New York City.” These materials are now to be found in the Mabbott collection at the University of Iowa. These pages are generally typed, but often with penciled notes in Mabbott's own hand. It is not clear when most of the notes were written; a few, in the appendix section, bear a tag of May 4, 1960. The material for Poe's texts are photocopied from the original source, cut and pasted on pages of same size, standard 8 1/2 x 11 inch letter paper.

There are sometimes present earlier drafts of notes, and in one case a comment that the order was intended to be alphabetical, although the format in which it now exists clearly suggests that at some point, Mabbott changed his mind and decided to retain the original order in which the entries were first printed. (This latter intention has been followed in this presentation with the assumption that Mabbott came to recognize the importance of reproducing the order as Poe originally gave them.) There are, among the notes, occasional comments that material needs to be verified, and some places where specific dates have been left blank or incomplete, presumably to be returned to later. These actions have now been completed, and occasional additional notes, provided by Jeffrey A. Savoye, who also prepared the material for the website. In general, the more substantive additions of this kind have been provided within double square brackets and signed with the initials “JAS.”

Some alterations have been made for the sake of formatting. Mabbott's notes were made over some unspecified period of time, and they are, to some extent, still in draft form. There are signs, for example, that he was changing some conventions such that story titles he initially rendered as underlined (thus italics) were being altered to use quotation marks. In general, such formatting has been modified to conform with choices that were ultimately implemented in the print editions of volumes I-III. Notes have been modified from the original line numbers, which was keyed to the assumption of reproducing Poe's texts as facsimiles of the originals, to more traditional notations, taking full advantage of having the texts newly available as editable text. A few very minor typographical errors have been corrected silently.

In referring to “Marginalia,” Mabbott always used his set of Harrison, with the missing installments accounted for, but his assigned number is often one too low. These references have been adjusted to agree with the numbering in the Pollin edition of The Brevities (1985). Similarly, the original indications directing the reader to the Harrison edition have been altered to instead use the Pollin volume.

In preparing this material, and with an awareness that page numbers make for useful reference points, it was decided that the pages in which the material currently survives would work adequately and help to connect the two presentations. Indeed, many of these pages have a pencilled notation for a page number, although not always consistent across the full material. Thus, they have been renumbered as necessary.

In the handwritten title page, Mabbott generously, and perhaps aspirationally, gives the name of his co-editor first. Here, they are reversed, returning to Mabbott the role as primary editor. (Technically, Mabbott planned for The Literati to occupy two volumes, as indicated by the table of contents above.)