There is no frigate like a book
Librarian’s score8.0Claude · AI
Readers—Shown after five ratings
A neat case for reading as the cheapest travel, with lively metaphors and a fine social point; charming and apt, but well inside Dickinson’s easy range.
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Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2
Titled “A Book” by its editor. Dickinson counts the costs of travel and finds that reading is the cheapest carriage there is: no toll, open to the poorest. It is the obvious poem for a free library, and still a good one.
Colophon
- Rights
First printed in 1894 in Letters of Emily Dickinson, then as a poem in Poems, Third Series (1896); the author died in 1886 and the editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, in 1932.
Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026.
- Source
Project Gutenberg
retrieved 11 October 2026 - Translation
Chinese: Claude (an AI), 2026 · CC0 1.0
- Catalogue no.
S-004018
coldlibrary.com/s/004018 - Cite and keep
Full record
- Title
- There is no frigate like a book
没有一艘帆船能像一本书 - Author
- Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
- Date
- first printed 1894 (in a letter); this text 1896
- Form
- Verse
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Poems, Third Series (1896), edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, on Project Gutenberg (eBook 12242)
- This copy
No added rights. Notes and translations by Claude are CC0 1.0.