North of Boston, a significant association copy, inscribed by Frost to his close friend, the Rabbi Victor Reichert, and Reichert's wife, Louise, during Frost's final summer in Ripton, Vermont, on 15 August 1962, five and half months before Frost's death.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1917. First U.S. edition, seventh printing. Hardcover. This is an inscribed 1917 (seventh) printing of the first U.S. edition of Robert Frost’s second published book, which bolstered his newly minted literary reputation and precipitated his return to the United States from England, where his first two books were published. Frost wrote four lines in ink at the upper right of the front free endpaper recto, beginning with his own name: "Robert Victor and Louise | in the same place and at the | same time as recorded in their | copy of A Further Range (where by)". The only other ownership marks in the book are the embossed name of “VICTOR E. REICHERT” applied to the blank upper margin of both the half title and title pages.
We may be certain that the book was inscribed by Frost during his final summer in Ripton, Vermont, on 15 August 1962, just five and half months before Frost's death; The Reicherts' copy of A Further Range was inscribed "Robert with Victor and Louise | together at Ripton Aug 15 62”.
This inscribed 1917 printing closely resembles the first printing, but is bound in dark green cloth rather than blue. Condition is very good plus. The binding is square, clean, bright, and tight with only trivial shelf wear to the corners and spine ends. The contents show just mild age toning, free of any spotting or soiling. Even the text block edges are clean. The sole interior defect we find is a small chip separated from the upper right corner of the front free endpaper (but still present, laid in). Of course, edition and condition are secondary to the association and timing of this inscription.
“Victor Reichert, rabbi of the Rockdale Avenue Temple, in Cincinnati, was one of Frost’s closest friends and confidants in the final decades of the poet’s life.” Their friendship spanned 24 years and was the fault of Victor’s wife, Louise. “Frost and Victor Reichert met in 1939 when Louise Reichert convinced her husband to see Frost speak at the Gibson Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. The rabbi, devoted to the writer Edwin Arlington Robinson, felt he didn’t need another poet to follow. But Louise Reichert, a fan of Frost since her days at Smith College, prevailed. Sitting in the front row at the reading, the rabbi was instantly rapt; afterward, he asked Frost to accompany him on a car ride through Eden Park… Soon after their initial meeting, Frost invited Reichert to visit him at a writers’ conference in August in Vermont, where he lived. From then on, Reichert would all but close down his synagogue every summer to sojourn with his family in Frost’s tiny town of Ripton.” It was during the last of these summer sojourns that Frost inscribed this book for Victor and Louise.
There was significant intellectual commerce in the friendship, even to the point that, during a 1946 visit to the Reicherts, Frost asked Rabbi Reichert if he could give the weekly sermon. Reichert accommodated, recording Frost’s sermon and later surprising him with a printed version. Frost certainly had his own mind about things, but it may be no accident that 1945 and 1947 saw him publish A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy, these centered on the Old Testament stories of Job and Jonah. “Frost… spent the summer of 1943 talking with Rabbi Reichert about the Old Testament, with special concern for the Book of Job, on which Reichert was a recognized authority.”
The Reicherts were friends sufficiently close, privy, and perceptive to be regularly quoted by Frost’s biographers. Many of Rabbi Reichert’s trove of letters, books, and newspaper clippings documenting his 24-year friendship with Frost are now in the University of Buffalo’s poetry collection.
Frost had a long-standing connection to the tiny town of Ripton, in Vermont’s Green Mountains, having summered and taught there beginning in the early 1920s. Ripton is home to the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which Frost helped conceive and with which he was indelibly associated. Following the death of his wife, from 1939 until his own death in 1963, Frost spent summer and fall months in a rustic cabin on the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, which is now owned and maintained as a museum by Middlebury College. Nearby, along the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail in the Green Mountain National Forest, a curated selection of Frost's poems is displayed on plaques.
References: Crane A3.2; Forward, 2 April 2013; Parini, Robert Frost: A Life; University of Buffalo. Item #008599
Price: $950.00