Remember that Harvard Magazine celebration of good old RWE? (I mentioned it on Monday.) Now the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam snarkily reports that the alumni magazine printed a picture of a fake Emerson! Scandal!
No wonder I briefly envied Harvard’s archives when I didn’t recognize the picture; I had spent a morning at the Boston Athenaeum looking through their collection of images for UU World’s Emerson cover story, and never saw anything like the newly infamous faux Emerson. What I did see, though, was dozens of Emerson calling cards — little Victorian curiosities that people would collect, like trading cards for the literary set. Emerson apparently loved having his picture taken!