years of his career. Only the most significant technical papers appeared in these initial volumes. Beginning with volume 3 (1986), the selection process was broadened to include more of the scientific, mathematical, and historical writings that, along with his philosophical papers, document the development of his thought across an ever-widening range of disciplines throughout the rest of his life.
The second stage of editorial refinement first appeared in volume 4 (1989) and involved presentation of the editorial material. Textual information was consolidated in the editorial apparatus for each selection, resulting in a clearer distinction between that apparatus and the content notes that precede it in its own section, along with the bibliography and the chronological list of Peirce’s manuscripts. Volume 5 (1993) was the last volume formatted by off-site printers; presswork for volume 6 (2000) reflected in-house advances in computing technology and a third evolution in editorial presentation that both adapts and extends the bibliographical achievements of earlier scholars. The chronological catalogs now number Peirce’s writings in their order of composition year by year, after the style of the Burks catalog in Volume 8 of the Collected Papers, and manuscripts are now identified by their Robin numbers (for Harvard’s Houghton Library collection) or by standard archive identifiers (for other collections). The preface to volume 6 and the introduction to volume 6’s chronological catalog provide a full explanation of the manuscript references now in use.
Publication of consecutive chronological volumes will continue to be the backbone of the series, but the Peirce Edition Project’s continuing shift toward parallel volume editing sometimes leads to out-of-sequence publication for special volumes in the series. The present volume reflects the first stage of this transition. Volume 8 covers the period from the spring of 1890 to mid-summer 1892 and continues directly from the period covered by volume 6 (fall 1886 to spring 1890). Peirce’s wide-ranging work preparing or refining thousands of definitions for the Century Dictionary spans both volume periods, but it is too vast to be represented adequately in either; the general chronological sequence will be bridged at a later date by volume 7, which will be devoted to the lexicographical work that occupied Peirce as much as any other project principally during the late 1880s and early 1890s, and then intermittently over a dozen more years.
The Preface to volume 6 prepared readers for this slight departure from the strict chronological production and outlined our plan to prepare volume 7 out of sequence. Since then, Indiana University’s Peirce Edition Project has formed an editorial partnership with what has now become the “Projet d’Édition Peirce” at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) to prepare volume 7’s dictionary texts. Under the direction of Professor François Latraverse, the PEP-UQAM faculty and staff editors have been working under two successive grants awarded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to identify, transcribe, edit, and lay out the definitions preserved in Peirce’s Harvard papers. Scholars affiliated with the University of Bamberg, working under a similar government grant awarded to Professor Helmut Pape by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, worked for several years on the 1903 Lowell Lectures and managed to both organize and transcribe their entire manuscript base; the result of their work will prove of considerable assistance when the Project eventually begins preparing and editing volume 22. Project editors assume supervisory editorial and production responsibilities for these volumes even as parallel work continues on other volumes in the series. Volumes that contain single works or unified series of lectures, such as “How to Reason” (volume 11), are also candidates for out-of-sequence publication. Volume 11 has been in the works for quite some time and is scheduled to appear a year or so after volume 9.
Changes in editorial content made in volume 6 have been continued with good effect in volume 8. The most significant of these involve expansion of the Annotations (Editorial Notes in volumes 1–3; Notes in volumes 4–5). In both volumes 6 and 8, the Annotations section is more comprehensive and includes significant quotations from Peirce’s preliminary drafts, variant fragments and working notes that were not selected for publication in the edition. The Chronological Catalog (Chronological List in volumes 1–5) also includes more information about writings of the volume period that were not selected for publication.
One further change in presentation is reflected in volume 8’s use of the Times font in place of the Caledonia family of fonts employed in the production of earlier volumes. As a result of this change, volume 8 holds more lines per page than volume 6 but preserves the readability of all previous volumes. Another reason for choosing the Times font was that it more effectively blends with the fonts used for scientific, logical, and mathematical characters. This font change, however, is merely transitional; in the longer run the Project intends to switch to another font that combines similar attributes with greater aesthetic appeal.
Taken together, these minor realignments and extensions of editorial matter and the recent modifications to volume design make it easier to navigate Peirce’s texts as well as the scholarship that documents their compositional and editing history. The editors have not changed the fundamental methods put in place early on to establish reliable texts for Peirce’s interdisciplinary writings, many of which never reached print (or even fair copy form) during his lifetime. As in earlier volumes, the texts of the volume 8 period are carefully annotated and are supported by an apparatus that lists historical variations and identifies all editorial emendations. The refinement of presentation outlined above is a natural progression for a series of this scope; in making these changes, the editors have been attentive to the need for continuity with the earlier volumes of the edition, and hope that readers will make their way seamlessly into Peirce’s writings of the 1890s—a decade that would prove to be the most stressful period of his life.
A special episode of editorial history deserves notice, for it explains why a particular expectation placed upon this volume could not in the end be fulfilled. Until the beginning of 2007, the press-work for volume 8 contained 59 selections instead of the current 56. The last three selections consisted of three untitled poems that Peirce hand-wrote some time in the spring of 1892, and that were eventually placed in folder R 1565 of the Harvard Peirce Papers (see entry 1892.94 in this volume’s Chronological Catalog). Besides the material artifact itself, with its penned alterations, and a related entry on an interleaf of Peirce’s copy of the Century Dictionary, there had been several reasons that made Peirce’s authorship of these poems seem plausible, including the fact that none of the experts consulted nor any of our extensive electronic searches could provide an alternate identification. In early January 2007, however, an obscure book that was part of the holdings of the New York Public Library was digitized and made searchable on-line as part of the collaborative partnership between that library and Google Books Library Project. A subsequent Internet search revealed this book as the true source of the poems, and thus we finally learned that Peirce’s daring poetic experiment had never taken place. The poems came from an anonymous book titled Sand Key (The Key to All) printed in London by the Chiswick Press in 1890 (see the Bibliography of Peirce’s References under “Anonymous”). The book appears to be a private publication, and the few copies so far located are all found in U.S. libraries. Peirce’s transcription of the poems (excerpted from the beginning of the book’s first part, “The Figure of True Representation”) contains a few modifications affecting punctuation and even the wording of some verses. We subsequently discovered that even these modifications could not be attributed to Peirce. Another copy of Sand Key was identified through Google Books, this time from the Widener Library at Harvard University. That copy’s inscriptions indicate that it was once the property of Harvard’s Dean of Theology, Prof. Charles Carroll Everett (1829–1900). Everett’s copy contains many inked alterations throughout, all presumably in the poet’s hand (not Everett’s hand), and Peirce’s modifications precisely match those alterations. We can therefore infer that some time in the spring of 1892, likely toward the end of May when he was in Cambridge, Peirce visited Everett, was shown the curious book, and, struck by its unusual content, asked to transcribe a few passages. Everett must have known the anonymous author pretty well—perhaps it was a student of his, since Everett also taught and wrote about poetry—but efforts to identify that person have so far failed. At any rate, if Peirce’s interest may serve as a recommendation, Sand Key is in several regards a highly
