Last week I wrote a post about the Haiku Society of America, which is thriving in the year 2025, so I also wanted to share this book published by the HSA in 1994 on the occasion of its 20th anniversary: A Haiku Path: The Haiku Society of America, 1968-1988. The book is available at the Internet Archive for borrowing! (One of the book's editors was William Higginson, whom I wrote about in my most recent post.)
The book is divided into three sections: the first section covers the first decade of the HSA's existence, followed by a section about its second decade, and then a third section which documents the HSA's awards and contests. There are reference materials ("HSA Definitions" of haiku, senryu, etc. which draw on correspondence, meeting minutes, etc.), essays ("Punctuation in Haiku," "Nature in Haiku," "Sound in Haiku," etc.), recollections, and memorials. Some of the materials will be useful for beginners, while others are for dedicated readers, writers, and scholars of haiku. And, of course, you can find plenty of haiku scattered throughout its pages! You can read more a detailed review here: Review of A Haiku Path by Ce Rosenow.
Because there were presumably not many copies of this book published, there are not any super-cheap used copies available (the best price I found was $26, with prices increasing steadily from there). But here's the thing: this is not exactly the kind of book that people would read cover to cover. So, the Internet Archive copy, while it is clunky to read online, does make it possible for you to peruse the table of contents and see what items would be of most interest to you!
Here then is a link to the table of contents. You can scroll through the table of contents to see what grabs your attention. These are not clickable links, but the pagination at the Internet Archive is good. So, for example, if you, like me, are curious about the title of Harold Henderson's essay, "Down with the Old Pond Haiku," which is found on p. 131, you can just insert that into the page number of the Archive URL, and presto: there you are!
archive.org/details/haikupath0000unse/page/131/
And I am so glad I took a look: this is just a tiny essay, 2 pages, in which Henderson compares Basho's famous frog to Basho's death-poem, written eight years later, which Henderson translates as:
On a journey, ill,
and over fields all withered, dreams
run wandering still.
I'll confess that, just speaking for myself, I'm not a fan of Henderson's use of rhyme in English haiku (although that is a subject for another post...), but this little essay is deeply touching because apparently this was Henderson's last publication about haiku before his own death a month later in 1974. The HSA dedicated this book to Henderson's memory, and you can read more about Henderson and his contributions to the study of haiku and Japanese culture generally at Wikipedia: Harold Gould Henderson.
So, I will probably not be acquiring a physical copy of this book for my bookshelf (unless I stumble upon a super-cheap copy after all), but I am very grateful that a copy is available at the Internet Archive; I will be dipping in here and there to explore the other items I see in the table of contents that make me curious to read and learn more! You might want to do the same, so here's that link again: A Haiku Path. (And I'll add: yay for the Internet Archive and controlled digital lending!)