by David F. Wood
Photography by David Bohl
Design by Gilbert Design Associates, Inc.
Printed by Reynolds DeWalt Printing
160 pages, 120 color illustrations

Hardcover: $39.95 plus tax
Member Price: $35.96 plus tax
Shipping Cost: $8.00 first book, $3.00 each additional

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Stop by or call the Concord Museum Shop, (978) 369-5477.

Explore for the first time in a fully-illustrated book the role that objects — including those in the Concord Museum's extraordinary collection — played in the life of Henry D. Thoreau. An Observant Eye opens with a ground-breaking essay, "A Common Sense Applied to the Objects: Thoreau and Material Culture," followed by seven chapters examining some 150 objects from the collection, each pictured in color.  The book also includes a checklist of an additional 100 objects in the Thoreau collection, extensive footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. Designed by Gilbert Design Associates, Inc. of Providence, with 120 color illustrations by David Bohl, a well-known museum photographer, the new book is a treat for the eye as well as the mind.

The book has a two-part purpose. The first is to make the Concord Museum's unique collection of objects related to Henry Thoreau and his family better known. Many details of Thoreau's everyday life in Concord can be discerned in these objects, and for this reason alone they are well worth study.  The second purpose is to explore the role that objects — including some of these very objects — played in Thoreau's intellectual life. He was distinctively aware of the ability objects have to communicate. In this, as in his approach to natural history, his thinking is remarkably current. 

An Observant Eye is supported by a "Museums for America" grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency; the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and several private foundations and individuals.