West-Running Brook, copy #196 of the limited and numbered edition, signed by both Robert Frost and the illustrator, still housed in the publisher's slipcase.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928. Limited Edition. Hardcover. This is a beautifully well-preserved copy of the limited, numbered, and signed edition that followed the publisher's first, trade edition. "Though printed in the same year as the first [trade] edition by the same publisher, this edition is in an entirely different setting and format with different pagination." The binding is quarter green cloth with paper-covered boards illustrated with fall-hued maple leaves in brown, red-orange, green, and yellow-gold on a gray background . The contents are printed on laid, watermarked paper with untrimmed fore and bottom edges and gilt top edges and bound with head and tail bands. The edition is illustrated with a frontispiece and three woodcuts by J. J. Lankes, each plate signed by the artist in pencil. The limitation page preceding the half-title is hand-numbered - in this case "196" - of one thousand copies and signed "Robert Frost". The book was issued in a green paper-covered cardboard slipcase with white paper spine label.
Condition is better than near fine. The binding is square, clean, tight, immaculately clean, and wholly unfaded with sharp corners. We note only the slightest shelf wear confined to the edges and joint extremities, almost certainly simply from contact with the publisher's original slipcase, which has otherwise admirably done its job preserving the binding. The contents are pristine - bright and clean with no spotting, no soiling, no toning, and a crisp, unread feel. The publisher's slipcase, hand-numbered "196" on the lower spine, is complete, though with a split along the top edge of the front face.
This collection includes notable pieces such as “Once by the Pacific”, “Bereft”, “Acquainted with the Night”, and the titular “West-Running Brook”. The latter is a profound meditation on a brook that curiously runs West rather than South and accrues phenomenological significance via a dialogue between a man and a woman. Publication followed four years after Frost’s first Pulitzer Prize win and is the work of a master writing at the top of his form. West-Running Brook is every bit as daring and provoking as Frost works that received conspicuous literary honors and harbors ideas that would come to define him as one of America’s superlative voices — to borrow phrasing from Frost, a voice that “most we see ourselves in…that is most us.” The first trade edition was published on 19 November 1928, this signed and numbered limited edition following swiftly thereafter.
Iconic American poet 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 Salem, New Hampshire, to resume a teaching career. There Frost swiftly found his poetic voice, infused by New England scenes and sensibilities. Promising as both a student and writer, Frost nonetheless dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, supporting a young family by teaching and farming. Ironically, a 1912 move to England with his wife and children – “the place to be poor and to write poems” – finally catalyzed his recognition as a noteworthy American poet. A Boy’s Will was completed in England and published there in 1913. By 1924 he won the first of his eventual four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1931, 1937, and 1943, for this volume). Frost spent his final years as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with a host of academic and civic. 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 A10.1, Clymer and Green pp.44-45. Item #008634
Price: $900.00