From Snow to Snow, Binding A of the first edition, one of three hundred copies featuring a special insert, this copy signed and dated by Frost in the year of publication

Robert Frost

Published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1936

About this Item

This is a signed first edition, Binding A, and one of only three hundred copies with a special insert, this copy rendered exceptional by being signed and dated "Robert Frost | 1936".This edition saw two printings issued in three different bindings in 1936. This is the first printing in the elusive and fragile first "Binding A" issued in a single quarto fold of heavy light-tan mottled paper wrappers printed in gray-blue on the front cover and wire-stitched, with two staples at the center fold. The contents are printed in black on white laid paper. Just "Three hundred copies of this edition have a single conjugate fold of two leaves tipped in preceding the half-title. The first panel announces the "Twentieth Anniversary Week" of "The Hampshire Bookshop" with Robert Frost as the "Guest of Honor on the evening of April 16, 1936". The third panel is a facsimile 18-line autograph letter signed by Frost to a "Miss Dodd," the bookshop's proprietor, praising her bookshop as "one of the few. in the world where books are sold in something like the spirit they were written in." Like the contents, the insert is printed in black on white laid paper. Frost signed and dated the insert, ostensibly on the night of 16 April, when he was Guest of Honor at the shop.Condition is very good. The fragile wraps binding is clean, complete and still attached - albeit tenderly - by the original binding staples. The wraps binding shows light wear to extremities where they overhang the text block and short splits along the spine. The contents are clean and complete, with no spotting, soiling, or previous ownership marks. We note minor age-toning and brittling, with tiny closed tears to the left fore edge margins of the two leaves spanning pages 15-18. The insert is clean and complete with no wear or spotting and only mild age-toning. The titular "From Snow to Snow" delimits a year, spanning January through December, for each month of which Frost selected a poem. These twelve are, in order, "Storm Fear," "A Winter Eden," "To The Thawing Wind," "Blue-Butterfly Day," "Spring Pools," "The Tuft of Flowers," "The Mountain," "The Oven Bird," "The Cow in Apple Time," "The Road Not Taken," "Good-Bye and Keep Cold," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The frontispiece is a facsimile signed manuscript of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". In 1936, when he inscribed this volume, Robert Frost (1874-1963) was still ascending to the dizzying literary heights that would let him spend his final years as "the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century" with an accumulating hoard of academic and civic honors. The feat, remarkable in itself, is all the more remarkable considering that Frost did not publish his first volume of poetry until he was nearly 40 years old. Only weeks after publication of From Snow to Snow came publication of a new collection, A Further Range, in May 1936. Frost had already won two of to-this-day-still-unrivalled four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943). In 1937 he would win his third for A Further Range.References: Crane A20; Tuten and Zubizarreta; ANB.

Seller Inventory # 008736

Bibliographic Details

• Title: From Snow to Snow, Binding A of the first edition, one of three hundred copies featuring a special insert, this copy signed and dated by Frost in the year of publication
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, New York
• Publication Date: 1936
• Binding: Wraps
• Edition: First edition, Binding A.
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Other Poetry
  • Other Signed & Inscribed