“Hey, so I finally finished my book!”

“Congrats! What’s it about?”

“Emily Dickinson’s letters.”

“Like the relationship between her letters and her poems? Or the letters she wrote to her sister-in-law? Or the letters she wrote to people asking weird questions like ‘Do you think my Verses are alive?’”

“Well, yeah, no. Actually about the Master letters.”

“Aw, neat – one of the great literary mysteries! So…any new background – theories – discoveries – secret insights?”

“Actually, that’s not really what the book is about.”

“How can you write a book about three incredibly intense and fragmentary literary texts and not go into any of that?”

“Okay, well, actually, I didn’t really write the book so much as I transcribed it.”

“Are you telling me that you transcribed the Master letters and tried to turn that text alone into a book under your very own name without including any sort of critical apparatus?”

“There is so some critical apparatus! I put in facsimiles as well as transcriptions that show the stages each letter went through.”

“So…then…what you’re saying is that I have to get your book to actually read the letters, but then, if I want any clue at all about their context or significance or, you know, anything else, I have to hit the library again? Dude – seriously – you can’t say you’ve written a book about something if all you did is reproduce the text. That’s like me claiming that I wrote a whole book about Shakespeare when all I did was transcribe a bad quarto. Cheater.”