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This first edition, first printing, is noteworthy for a trifecta of virtues excellent condition, sterling provenance, and the author s signature. Frost signed this copy in black ink on the second preliminary sheet recto: "Robert Frost". This attractive edition is bound in tan linen cloth with gilt illustration on a maroon background on the front cover and gilt title and author on a maroon field on the spine, the contents bound with rust-red stained top edge and head and foot bands. The red-brown dust jacket is illustrated with Lankes wood-engraving of a house.Condition is fine in a very good plus dust jacket. The binding is immaculate, square, and tight with sharp corners and no reportable wear. The contents are likewise immaculate, free of soiling or spotting. Mild age-toning appears confined to the otherwise clean fore and bottom edges. The topstain retains uniform, dark color. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original "$5.00" front flap price, notably clean, and complete apart from the most fractional hint of loss at the upper front flap fold. Light wear to extremities is more than compensated by rich, unfaded color. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.The sole previous ownership mark, affixed to the front pastedown, is the small, illustrated bookplate of American bibliophile and director of the Pierpont Morgan Library "Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr." (1910-2001). Adams assembled major collections of the works of Robert Frost, of which this book was a part, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woof, as well as "a formidable collection of radical literature, perhaps the largest in the United States and capable even of rivaling Russian holdings." During his 1948-1969 tenure as director, "the Morgan made some of its most spectacular acquisitions and completed its transition from a private library to a public institution, with research facilities, educational opportunities, and an exhibitions program." (American Antiquarian Society)This 1939 edition was Frost s second volume of collected poems, following that of 1930. Pages vii-xii and text pages 1-349 are apparently printed from the plates of the 1930 edition of Collected Poems, while pages xiii-xv are in a new setting intended to match the preceding contents pages and comprise the contents listing for A Further Range. Pages 351-436 are similarly in new imitative setting. Frost s introduction The Figure a Poem Makes is printed herein for the first time. The collection contains all poems from first editions of North of Boston, New Hampshire, and A Further Range. Poems from A Boy s Will, Mountain Interval, and West-Running Brook are those included in the 1930 Collected Poems. (Crane, A23, p.65) Iconic American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963), the quintessential poetic voice of New England, was actually born in San Francisco and first published in England. When Frost was eleven, his newly widowed mother moved east to New Hampshire, where Frost found his poetic voice, infused by New England scenes and sensibilities. A 1912 move to England with his wife and children "the place to be poor and to write poems" finally catalyzed his recognition. There A Boy s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) were published.Accolades met his return to America at the end of 1914 and he soon began "the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever subjects he pleased at a congenial college… and barding around, his term for saying poems in a conversational performance." (ANB) By 1924 he had won the first of his eventual four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1931, 1937, and 1943). Frost spent the final decade and a half of his life as "the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century" with a host of academic and civic honors. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).Reference: Crane A23. Seller Inventory # 008023
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Collected Poems of Robert Frost, signed by ...
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, New York
Publication Date: 1939
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First edition, first printing.
