Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold, (1898), title page and table of contents

Notes:

The text for this electronic version of the book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included.

There is no table of contents in the original, so one has been created here for the sake of breaking the pages into sections of a reasonable size.

On the back of the title page, the copyright line reads: “Copyright, 1898, by W: M. Griswold.”

Because the book was essentially self-published, William Griswold was able to implement two very strange features in the text and typography of the book. First, he used what were presumably intended as simplified spellings, so that “have,” “give” and “are” consistently appear in the descriptive texts as “hav,” “giv” and “ar,” without their ending “e,” although these words are spelled out in the more usual form within the letter texts quoted. Similarly, “thought” is reduced to “thot,” “enough” to “enuf,” “below” to “belo,” “though” to “tho,” “owned” to “ond,” and “daughters” to “dauters.” In another bit of truncation, he has typically omitted the “e” in words with an “ed” ending, so that “loved” is given as “lovd,” and “suppressed” as “suppressd,” although not always consistently as a number of “ed” words retain their full ending. In addition to these abbreviations, the letter “o” is presented with accent marks, both in descriptive texts and the letters quoted, presumably to indicate phonetic aspects. Thus, “to” and “do” appear consistently as “tŏ” and “dŏ,” “one” and “above” as “õne” and “abõve,” and his abbreviation of “thot” as “thôt.” Many lower case letter “g”s also appear to have a small dot above them, as “ġ.” Further, first initials have generally been marked with a colon, while a period has been used for a middle initial, such that “W. M. Griswold” appears as “W: M. Griswold,” although this quirk has been followed with less fidelity than the other features noted. The precise purpose and ultimately the actual utility of such schemes is uncertain, and mostly it just presents a rather bizarre and slightly cabalistic effect to the overall appearance of the text. For the sake of modern readers, and to facilitate the ability to search the text, these peculiarities have been eliminated in this online presentation, with this note considered as sufficient for documenting the editorial choice.