I just watched “84 Charing Cross Road” and suddenly, I realize that my life won’t go on if I can’t find a complete edition of Pepys’ diary. There is indeed a recent edition of it in eleven volumes, only three of which are available at amazon.com, and only five of which are on barnesandnoble.com. Why on earth won’t anyone sell me the complete set?
I don’t know. I guess they think no one’s up for unabridged Pepys any more… probably there are some dull bits to go with the “had a wank, had a shag” bits. But if you find a way to get the unabridged, let me know; I’ve been wanting that for a while myself.
Mrs. Furthur
There are a number of complete hardbound sets out there if you are willing to pay the price. They start at about $480 used.
You can find the complete Pepys online in quite a few places, and if you’re on Livejournal you can have it delivered to you in daily bites along with a few hundred other things (Metafilter, BBC, Doonesbury…).
This will be the edition edited by Robert Latham (which has become the standard scholarly one). If you can’t find it in it’s entirety elsewhere, you could order it direct from its US publisher, the University of California Press: see here on their website. They seem to have all the volumes in stock.
Thanks for the ideas, all. It had never occurred to me, for some reason, to order it all from the publisher…
Just back from the local used books shop, where I went looking for Pepys, but came out with the Waverly novels in gorgeous gold-stamped hardcover. $66 for the lot. In light of this, isn’t $480 for Pepys a little steep?
Or, you could get a bunch of monkeys and a bunch of typewriters…
Here is where you can find Pepys diary published as a blog. It should take about 10 years to publish the entire diary in daily entries.
Unfortunately, Easter is over for this year.
Oh, “Pepys.” Never mind.
But seriously, http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/p#a1181.