A Masque of Reason, the signed limited edition, copy number 455 of 800 in the original slipcase, from the personal collection of one of Frost's first bibliographers, W. B. Shubrick Clymer.
New York: Printed by The Spiral Press for Henry Holt and Company, 1945. The Signed and Limited issue of the first edition. Hardcover. This is the first, limited, numbered, and signed edition of one of iconic American poet Robert Frost’s precious few dramatic works. This copy is noteworthy both for condition and provenance, having been the personal copy of one of Frost’s first bibliographers.
This limited edition was printed for the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, by The Spiral Press on 8 February 1945 and is given publication precedence over the first trade edition, published concurrent with Frost’s 70th birthday on 26 March 1945. Eight hundred copies of this first and limited edition were produced, each signed by Frost on the hand-numbered limitation page. This is copy “455” signed “Robert Frost”. This limited edition was bound in quarter tan linen cloth over brown paper-covered boards, the front cover with an inset dark brown, gilt-stamped title and author panel. The contents were printed on white laid paper bound with untrimmed fore and bottom edges. The volume was issued in an unadorned black paper-covered card slipcase.
This copy is in very good plus condition, retaining the original slipcase. The binding is square, clean, tight, and sharp-cornered with no appreciable wear. We would grade it as truly fine if not for some incidental moisture exposure and apparent minor transfer of black from the slipcase to the head and tail of the quarter linen spine. The contents are clean, with no spotting or previous ownership marks, and retain a pleasingly crisp feel. The original slipcase is fully intact, with modest wear to extremities occasionally exposing the card beneath the black paper.
Laid into this copy we found a printed slip declaring that this book is “FROM THE ROBERT FROST COLLECTION OF W. B. Shubrick Clymer.” William Branford Shubrick Clymer (1906-1972) received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, served as a personnel manager of the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company, and served, after retirement, in the New Hampshire State Legislature. He also was a book collector who, along with librarian Charles R. Green, compiled the first comprehensive bibliography of Robert Frost's works.
Iconic American poet Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) is “generally not known as a dramatist despite his lifelong love of the theater and despite the fact that many of his best poems owe a large part of their greatness to their dramatic nature… Frost’s most important ‘plays,’ however, may be his two masques, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947). Though both pieces have been staged, they are best considered as closet dramas in which distinctly human, American, and modern prototypes engage in theological/ideological debate via colloquial blank verse…. In A Masque of Reason, Frost dramatizes a confrontation between God, Job, and Job’s wife Thyatira. Job and Thyatira press God for an explanation of Job’s seemingly unwarranted torture, ultimately eliciting the surprising confession, ‘I was just showing off for the Devil.’ …Frost’s God runs the risk of sounding smug, cruel, and cavalier, yet he seems to serve as spokesperson for Frost’s own philosophy on the relationship between humanity and God. As Peter J. Stanlis observes, ‘the main thrust of Frost’s theme is a criticism of the human error of reading man’s own rational nature into God.’”
A Masque of Reason was published at a time when his stature had risen to an apex sufficient for publishers and his reading public to indulge his literary experiment. By 1945, Frost had already won all of his still-unrivaled four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1924, 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 an accumulating hoard 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 A27; Tuten and Zubizarreta; New York Times; ANB. Item #008591
Price: $400.00