Oxford University Press has just published The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, advisory eds. Jan Golinski, Frank James and the late David Knight, with the assistance of Andrew Lacey. Eleven years in the making, SHAC contributed a couple of small grants to the project, this is the first scholarly edition of the correspondence of a man many literary critics know as the friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Walter Scott.  He was regarded as the greatest chemist ever, having used the Voltaic pile to decompound substances and reveal new elements—including potassium, sodium, chlorine and iodine—demonstrating the forces that hold matter together to be electrochemical.   He experimented with nitrous oxide, designed a mine safety lamp, and became the most charismatic lecturer of the era.  He knew James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, John Dalton, Henry Mackenzie, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Banks, William Godwin, Lord Byron, Germaine de Staël, John Opie, William and Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.  He was a controversial President of the Royal Society. His protégés were Michael Faraday and John Herschel. He was a pioneering geologist; he wrote a lot of poetry—mostly landscape verse influenced by his intimate knowledge of Wordsworth’s, Southey’s and Coleridge’s poems (he had helped edit the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and Thalaba the Destroyer).