A Considerable Speck.
The magnificent broadside first separate printing of "One of Frost's most self-effacing and playful poems"
Massachusetts: Printed by Dard Hunter, Jr. for The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1939. First Separate Edition. Broadside. This scarce and beautiful 1939 broadside is the first separate edition of "A Considerable Speck". Frost's poem had first appeared four months before in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1939 and was later collected in A Witness Tree (1942, the work that would win him his final, and still-unrivaled fourth Pulitzer Prize for Poetry).
Description, production, and genesis
The poem is printed on the third panel of a single, 15.5 x 23.5 inches sheet of untrimmed paper, watermarked "HAND MADE", folded once to make four 15.5 x 11.75 inches panels. The first panel is printed with the title and author, separated by a single instance of the same fly device that borders the poem printed on the third panel. In addition to the "housefly" ornaments border, the poem begins with a single, large, capital "A" printed in brown. The paper was "made at the mill that had been set up in 1926 in Lime Rock, Connecticut, by Dard Hunter (1883-1966) for production of the fine press papers that could only be made by the slow, ancient hand methods." The type was "designed, cut, and cast entirely by hand by Dard Hunter, Jr."
A laid-in printed sheet from the "Recording Secretary" of "The Colonial Society of Massachusetts" claims "This poem was written [manifestly inaccurate] and delivered [true] by Robert Frost at the Annual Dinner on November twenty-first, 1939. The broadsides were intended as keepsakes for presentation to members of the society. The number printed is unknown; Crane asserts a source citing "less than 100 copies" while Blumenthal asserts "fewer than 200 copies". The craft of the piece is not in question. Neither is its scarcity, both in production and survival.
Condition
Condition is near fine, quite suitable for framing or other display. The broadside is complete, with no loss, tears, creasing, or appreciable wear, and clean apart from incidental soiling at the upper and lower left front panel corners and a four inch wide vertical stripe of slightly differential toning that affects only the blank rear panel. The laid in "Colonial Society of Massachusetts" slip is in fine condition.
Important differences
The poem as printed in this 1939 broadside features noteworthy differences from the poem as first published in A Witness Tree (1942). Textual differences occur at line 14 ("horror" instead of "loathing"); line 25 ("Political collectivist love" instead of "Collectivist regimenting love"). Layout and punctuation differ. There is no stanza break separating the final four lines from the 29 preceding. Punctuation differs as follows: a comma instead of a full stop at the end of the third line; a comma at the end of the fifth line; lack of a full stop at the end of the sixth line; lack of a comma at the end of the sixth line; a semicolon instead of a comma at the end of the twelfth line; lack of a comma at the end of the sixteenth line; a dash instead of a comma at the end of twentieth line; a dash instead of a full stop at the end of the twenty-sixth line.
Considerable import
"One of Frost's most self-effacing and playful poems, "A Considerable Speck"... follows a microscopic mite as it scurries madly and wildly - and yet with some inscrutable purpose - across the page of a freshly written manuscript" on which the poet is working. "A Considerable Speck" was written at the height of Frost's successful and triumphant middle years... Frost could afford to confess his self-absorption by writing a sympathetic poem about an intelligent critic (a mite!) who slights Frost's writing (of course we hear Frost's comic irony in the overwrought encounter)."
There is directed political critique underlying the playfulness. Clearly of the time, Frost seems to reject the call of many eminent writers and poets of his generation to become active agents in social and political reform. Frost spares the mite not with "the tenderer-than-thou | Political collectivistic love | With which the modern world is being swept" but rather simply because "I have a mind myself and recognize | Mind where I meet with it in any guise." Underlying the coyly couched treatment of both critics and would-be literary activism, there is a greater and persistent Frost theme, "the tension between the presumed power of imagination and nonhuman otherness".
It is noteworthy that Frost chose the more subtle, less overtly political "Collectivist regimenting love" rather than this 1939 versions "Political collectivist love" for the poem as first collected in volume form for 1942's A Witness Tree. The change speaks to Frost's gift for, and attention to, enduring universality in his messaging.
Dard Hunter(s), Sr. and Jr.
The father and son printing collaboration merits special mention. William Joseph "Dard" Hunter (1883-1966) "accomplished that which, in his day, no American printer had thus far done: making books entirely by his own hand, printed on paper he himself had made by hand." Hunter came from a family of printers, so perhaps it was no surprise that he built a small water-powered mill and began making paper by hand in 1913. "At this time, there was no person or firm making paper by hand in America. In 1938, the year before this broadside was printed, Hunter "established the Dard Hunter Paper Museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The museum was moved in 1954 to Appleton, Wisconsin, and again, in 1990—long after his death—to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where it exists today as the American Museum of Papermaking." The father's paper was adorned by his son. Dard Jr., (1917-1989), who would later write a two-volume biography of his father, designed, cut, and cast the font and fly ornaments with which this broadside was printed - reportedly "one of his first pieces of printing."
References: Crane A24; Tuten and Zubizarreta, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia pp.64-65; Blumenthal, Robert Frost and His Printers pp.31-32; Swan's Fine Books; ANB. Item #008831
Price: $1,500.00