In 1840, Thoreau was recording journal entries about his 1839 trip with his brother John up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He started to think seriously of a book based on the trip after John's death in 1842. As he copied over journal entries relating to the trip, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers began to take shape in his mind. He was able to work his preliminary material into a first draft while living at Walden Pond; the second draft was completed in 1847. He continued to expand and revise the book until its publication in 1849. He first approached Ticknor & Company (predecessor of Ticknor and Fields) but, unable to obtain satisfactory terms, sent the manuscript to James Munroe and Company early in 1849. Munroe agreed to publish the book at the author's expense and issued it in an edition of 1,000 copies in May. In 1853, Munroe returned 706 unsold copies (256 bound, 450 in sheets) to the author. In 1862, just before Thoreau's death, Ticknor and Fields (publisher of Walden in 1854) bought the remaining 145 bound copies and the 450 unbound copies, which were reissued in 1862 with a new title page. A second edition, including revisions that Thoreau had made in his own copy of the first edition, was published by Ticknor and Fields in 1868, and later reissued several times. The first English edition appeared in 1889. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was published as the first volume of the Riverside Edition of Thoreau's complete writings in 1894, as the first volume of the Walden and Manuscript Editions in 1906, and as the fifth volume of the Princeton Edition in 1980. Editions by a variety of publishers were issued in the twentieth century. Selections from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers were included in the Modern Library Edition of Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Brooks Atkinson and first published in 1937. The essay on friendship from the chapter "Wednesday" has been separately printed a number of times.
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