Lithographies

1952 · rif. 008730 — New York: Printed at The Spiral Press 1952. First edition. Paperback. This original Robert Frost 1952 Christmas Card is the first published appearance of this poem and is twice signed by Frost. 3875 copies were printed for 14 different names. This is one of 475 printed for the poet himself. And this particular copy is signed twice by Frost. On the title page in two lines directly below his printed name Frost wrote: “Robert Frost your subject”. A printed laid-in slip reads “This Christmas poem though not isolationist is so dangerously near isolationist it was thought better to send it out for Independence Day instead of Christmas.” Just below this print in two lines Frost initialed “R. F.” and dated “July 4 53”. The binding is beige laid paper wrappers with flaps folded over thin card beneath fastened to the contents by two staples at the center fold. The covers feature a dark green printed underwater scene with six fishes invertebrates and plants. The contents printed in black and gray-green feature a frontispiece lithograph of ocean waves and a half-page lithograph of sea birds on rocks. Condition approaches near fine the binding clean tight and sharp cornered the binding staples intact and uncorroded the wraps showing just a few faint creases emanating from the spine. The contents are clean with no spotting or soiling. With the permission of Frost and his publishers in 1929 The Spiral Press began printing an annual Robert Frost Christmas Card featuring one of his poems. The tradition continued until 1962 Frost's final Christmas. Each annual Christmas poem publication was printed with varying names on the title page to accommodate their being sent by various Frost publishers artists and important friends. This copy is one of those printed for Frost himself the imprint “Holiday Greetings from Robert Frost” printed on the title page. By a full decade this is the first publication of the poem “Does No One But Me at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least”. The poem was not published in a Frost collection until his last In The Clearing published in 1962 when Frost was nearly 90 years old. “Does No One But Me…” is seven stanzas of six lines each in iambic pentameter. “It is a complaint about the lost possibilities of the sea exacerbated by American homesickness to function as a protective boundary that could have defined and ensured the promise of greatness of a ‘New World.’ What comes across most powerfully in this poem is the coalition of forces both human and natural conspiring to prevent newness.” By late 1952 when this poem first appeared in his annual Christmas card and he inscribed this copy Robert Frost 1874-1963 was entering the final decade of his life as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with an accumulating hoard of academic and civic honors. Nearly a decade had passed since he had won his still-to-this-day-unrivalled fourth Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This is all the more remarkable given that he did not publish his first volume of poetry until he was nearly 40 years old. He would continue writing publishing and “barding around” his term until his end. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration Kennedy January 1961. References: Crane B24; Tuten and Zubizarreta; ANB Printed at The Spiral Press paperback