An Illustrated Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

From the moment you pick up the book Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, it is evident that it is in some way concerned with the history of Poe's texts and the process by which these texts came to be. In a text banner above the title are the words "With removable memorabilia including handwritten letters, drafts, and more". When you read through this book you are indeed getting a great deal of biographical information on Poe, answering some of the questions that Darnton says we should be posing about the author including his relationship to his patron and how Poe dealt with publishers, printers, and reviewers. The book is also concerned with the way that the texts looked in their original manuscript versions, what some of his texts would have looked like on the printed page, and what Poe thought of their printing. Ultimately though what I find it to be most concerned with is the reader and chronicling how Poe has been read over time. This book does not only mention the manuscripts, letters, marriage certificates, etc. but it provides full transcriptions in its index and also actual material copies of these things that the reader can take out of envelopes and examine in their hands. This of course would change how the reader interacts with Poe's texts, but also give them key information about the author and his texts. In the Preface the book (incidentally written and edited by a distant cousin of Poe himself) posits itself as a helpful aid to those that have only been reading Poe as a macabre figure. The book examines how Griswold, one of Poe’s editors and critics, changed the way we now read Poe because of Griswold’s interactions with Poe. Even in the acknowledgments it is interesting to examine how this version of the letters, manuscripts, and text came to be through the passing down of artifacts (letters kept by other members of the Poe family, the Poe museum, etc.). This book, though examining the history of Poe’s texts and publications, is also a fascinating textual artifact itself.