This year, for the first time, I’ve been compiling all my Pepys erasures into a single document. I’ve just slapped on a title page and converted it to a PDF. Here it is:
The Hidden Poems of Samuel Pepys: 1664
At 394 pages, this is clearly unpublishable in any conventional sense… and it’s just one of what may someday be a ten-volume work. If you’ve been following along all year (thank you!) the main difference you’ll notice is that the blog titles aren’t there, and neither (obviously) are the links back to Phil Gyford’s wonderful site. I’ve always viewed those titles as extrinsic, just there because the blog environment demands them. The digest versions of the poems, however, cannot be excluded, since they do things like conform spellings to modern usage and suggest semantic breaks.
If anyone does download and read through this, please do me a favor in return for the free download: jot down the dates of your favorites and pass them along when you’re done. At some point when the diary is over, I may well put together a selection of favorite erasures.
Thank you! I’m looking forward to spending time with this. :-)
Thank you Dave. A wonderful New Year’s gift. I already have a list of favourites but will prune it down to the top ten!