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Discarding the Literary Emporium: An Unauthorized Reprint of "The Raven"

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The Literary Emporium is a periodical of interest today to scholars and collectors chiefly because it features, in the final pages of the volume for 1845, an early printing of Poe’s famous and enduring poem “The Raven.” For no other consideration would such an unremarkable book be able to command prices in the range of $500–$1,500. It is usually encountered as a single volume of 378 pages, bound in cloth, with a title page that reads either “Vols. I & II” (bearing an imprint date of 1845), or as a single volume (with an imprint date of 1846). It was reissued again with no imprint date as The Pearl Offering, listing the publishers as L. L. Boardman (London) and H. S. Samuels (New York), probably about 1848–54. The Literary Emporium is first mentioned in Poe bibliographies by J. H. Whitty in his 1911 edition of Poe’s poems, and it is collated with other versions by Killis Campbell in his own edition of Poe’s poems (1917). It is subsequently listed in the census of Poe’s printings by Heartman and Rede (1932), and again in the revised edition by Heartman and Canny (1941 and 1943). In each of the Heartman bibliographies, the magazine is listed as having vols. 1–4, with the dates as 1845–46. (These bibliographers were apparently unaware that the 1846 printing merely presents the older contents with a new title page.) In the 1969 collection of Poe’s poems, T. O. Mabbott states, with far too little explanation, that “the readings suggest that the text in the Literary Emporium (L) was authorized” (presumably because it generally agrees with most of the substantive variants of later texts).1 Much to the contrary, my own research strongly suggests that the appearance of the poem in this rather dubious periodical was entirely unauthorized, and the text should be relegated to the long list of mere reprints. Discarding the Literary Emporium: An Unauthorized Reprint of “The Raven”