Hard not to be King, copy number 243 of the limited and numbered first separate edition, signed by Robert Frost.
New York: House of Books, Ltd., 1951. First, signed, limited, and numbered edition. Hardcover. This is the first separate edition - limited, numbered, and signed - of Frost's poem "How hard it is to keep from being King when it's in you and in the situation" was later collected in In the Clearing more than a decade later (1962). Per the limitation statement, the edition was "limited to three hundred numbered copies signed by the author." The edition is bound in blue linen cloth, stamped in gilt on the spine and front cover. The contents were printed in red and black on cream laid paper. Copies were priced at $3.50 and first sent out by the publisher, House of Books, Ltd. of New York, on 25 June 1951.
This copy is signed "Robert Frost" on the limitation page and numbered "243". Condition is very good minus. The blue cloth binding is square, tight, and clean with sharp corners. The spine is uniformly toned, but the gilt spine print remains legible. The front cover shows milder differential toning than the spine. The contents are clean and bright with no spotting. The sole previous ownership mark is a small bookseller’s sticker, of “WITKOWER’S” of “HARTFORD, CONN,” affixed to the lower left rear pastedown and providing apropos New England provenance.
"According to Frost in unpublished comments at Bread Loaf in 1962, he 'lifted the story out of the Arabian Nights.' His retelling brings into focus a question that informs both Greek tragedy and Judeo-Christian theology: Are we masters of our own destiny? The narrative recounts the futile attempt of the rightful king and prince of Ctesiphon to abandon their royal responsibilities. So that his son, an aspiring poet, may have money to live on, the king permits himself to be sold, anonymously, into slavery - an act by which he unwittingly defies superhuman forces... The outcome - a reversal of the King's scheme - might be summed up by the line 'Man proposes; God disposes.' But no such formula captures the full meaning of 'How Hard,' which breaks through rational parameters to disclose the mystery of human freedom. The poem undercuts our autonomy in the practical realm so as to exalt it in the spiritual. The enigma of free will is a recurrent theme in Frost... "How Hard" investigates freedom at various levels - aesthetic, moral, spiritual."
By the time Hard not to be King was published in 1951, iconic American poet Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) had already won all four of his still-unrivalled four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He would spend his final years as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with an accumulating hoard of literary and civic honors. In 1961, two years before his death, Frost became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration. The man who had written Hard not to be King thus helped usher in the brief, thousand-day, mythical golden age of President John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot”.
References: Crane A36; Tuten and Zubizarreta; ANB. Item #008604
Price: $450.00