A Further Range, a significant association copy of Frost's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, inscribed by Frost to his close friends Victor and Louise Reichert during Frost's final summer in Ripton, Vermont, on 15 August 1962, just five and a half months before Frost's death.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936. First trade edition, first printing. Hardcover. This first trade edition, first printing, of Frost’s third Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection was inscribed by Frost to close friends during his final summer at his Ripton, Vermont home just five and a half months before his death. In two lines on the front free endpaper recto Frost wrote: "Robert with Victor and Louise | together at Ripton Aug 15 62”.
Condition is better than very good minus. The red-brown coarse linen cloth binding is square, tight, and sharp cornered, though the spine is moderately toned, the covers with a number of small, superficial blemishes. The contents are clean, age-toned but with no spotting or soiling and retaining strong, uniform red topstain. There is some offsetting to the endpapers from the pastedown glue and the ghost of what appears to be an erased surname beneath Frost’s inscription. Of course, condition is secondary to the important association.
“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. The particular significance of this particular first edition – by then more than a quarter of a century old and predating their friendship by three years – may never be known. We can speculate that it was poems from this 1936 volume that Frost read at the Cincinnati event where he first met the Reicherts.
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.
Reference: Crane A21.1, Forward, 2 April 2013; Parini, Robert Frost: A Life; University of Buffalo. Item #008754
Price: $1,500.00