Collectors gathered on October Third
To commemorate the writing of verse.
National Poetry Day was observed
With charming books, some alike, some diverse.
Brittle leaves creaked as pages slowly turned,
Revealing phrases from days long gone by.
New books, finely bound, by authors concerned
With memories of moments gone awry.
Names you recognize like Poe and Thoreau,
In first edition or facsimile,
Bring fond memories reading Longfellow
Or Dickinson… though not so cheerily.
The poets' words both challenge and inspire,
But the book itself is a work of art.
We caress the paper folded in quire
And cherish the tome with all of our heart.
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| Thanatopsis and other Poems |
Bryant, William Cullen. Thanatopsis and other Poems. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, n.d (c. 1890). "Thanatopsis" was first published in the North American Review in 1817. The poem was written by a teenage Bryant between 1811 and 1816 as a rejection of Puritanical conservativism. His father discovered the poem in Bryant's desk and submitted it for publication without his son's knowledge. Bryant revised "Thanatopsis" and published it along with nine other poems in 1821. The collection was expanded in 1832 and caught the attention of a larger literary audience, establishing Bryant as one of the great poets of his generation. This copy is a reprint of the 1821 edition by its original publisher.
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| The Raven and Other Poems |
Poe, Edgar A. The Raven and Other Poems. New York: Wiley and Putman, 1845. First edition. "The Raven" was first published in Poe's name as an "advance copy" in the January 29, 1845, issue of the New York Evening Mirror. It was published four more times in periodicals in February and March 1845 before its first appearance in book form on November 19, 1845, in The Raven and Other Poems. Poe meticulously and methodically penned the poem with close attention to rhythm, meter, and rhyme; he aimed to compose a poem which would appeal to both regular readers and critics. "The Raven" was an instant success with both readership groups, prompting Wiley and Putnam to publish two volumes of Poe's works in close succession: Tales in June 1845 and The Raven and Other Poems in November 1845.
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| The Song of Hiawatha |
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855. First edition. Longfellow's epic poem of Hiawatha and Minnehaha was first published on November 10, 1855, after months of anticipation. As early as August 1855, The New York Times teased the release of "Longfellow's New Poem." The publication was met with extremely mixed reviews of both its structure and content. Some critics attacked the use of trochaic tetrameter, finding trochees trite and overused, while The New York Times critic condemned the epic for its Native American characters, claiming there "is no romance about the Indian." In contrast, other critics praised the "strange, beautiful poem" and defended its indigenous characters. Despite the fights among its critics, the poem was immediately popular with readers. The book sold well—Longfellow calculated that 50,000 copies sold in the first 2 years—and continued to do so for decades. The epic remains one of Longfellow's best-known poems, alongside "Evangeline" and "Paul Revere's Ride."
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| The Song of Hiawatha |
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha. New York: Newson & Company, n.d. (ca 1940-1945). Standard Literature Series edition.
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| The Song of Hiawatha |
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha. Chicago: J. G. Ferguson Publishing Company, 1968. Facsimile of the 1890 edition illustrated by Frederic Remington.
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| Leaves of Grass Frontispiece and title page |
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| Leaves of Grass |
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Portland, ME: Thomas Bird Mosher and William Francis Gable, 1920. Facsimile edition of the 1855 text. Whitman's poetry collection was first published in 1855, though he continued to revise and expand it throughout the rest of his life. Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass with the help of James and Andrew Rome, printers in Brooklyn whom Whitman had known for many years. The first edition was printed without the names of either the author or publisher, though the work was not intended to be anonymous; the frontispiece was a steel engraving of Whitman, which offered the authorship of the poetry.
Whitman released six, seven, or nine editions—depending on which scholar you consult—between 1855 and 1892. While the 1855 first edition contained only 12 poems, the 1892 "deathbed edition" contained nearly 400 poems. At the end of 1891, Whitman wrote upon completion of the final edition, "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hacking at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old."
Whitman considered the 1892 edition to be the final edition and proclaimed it "to absolutely supersede all previous ones." While the revised and expanded version remains in print and is readily available, most collectors are interested in the earlier editions, the original 12-poem version chief among them. Facsimile editions of the 1855 first edition are generally more popular than the final edition.
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| Leaves of Grass |
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Eakins Press, 1966. Exact facsimile of the 1855 first edition.
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| Leaves of Grass |
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1997. Hardcover facsimile of the 1855 first edition.
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| Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War |
Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1866. First edition. Battle-Pieces is a collection of 72 short lyric and narrative poems about the battles and personalities of the Civil War and its aftermath. Melville dedicated the work "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Fathers." The critical response to Battle-Pieces was tepid; critics appeared sympathetic to Melville's memorial tribute, but were mostly unmoved by it. Fewer than 500 copies sold in the first two years, which barely covered half of the publication's printing costs. The poor sales of the first edition make the book scare for collectors today.
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| Ultima Thule |
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Ultima Thule. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1880. First edition. Ultima Thule is a small poetry collection; the titular poem is an ode to George Washington Greene, an American historian and lifelong friend of Longfellow, whom he befriended in Italy in 1828 and became a traveling companion of during their extended time in Europe. Other poems in the collection include an ode to President Garfield and laments on the deaths of fellow poets Robert Burns and Bayard Taylor. This copy is signed and dated by Longfellow, 1880, on a tipped in plate at the front.
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| Poems of Nature |
Thoreau, Henry David. Poems of Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1895. Selected and edited by Henry S. Salt and Frank B. Sanborn. Poems of Nature is a posthumously selected collection of fifty poems composed early in Thoreau's life, before he turned twenty-six; some of these poems were published during his lifetime. Thoreau wrote prolifically, but he often destroyed works which did not meet his expectations or the "exacting requirements of his friend [Ralph Waldo] Emerson." From among the published poems and those unpublished works preserved by Thoreau, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, an American journalist and biographer of Thoreau, and Henry Shakespear Salt, a British writer and social reform campaigner, selected what they considered to be his best poems. They considered his best works to be those which held personal significance to Thoreau himself—Emerson remarked that Thoreau's "biography is in his verses"—and exemplify his poetic character.
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| Poems: Third Series |
Dickinson, Emily. Poems: Third Series. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1906. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd. Dickinson wrote as many as 1,800 poems, but only ten were published during her lifetime. After Dickinson's death, her younger sister, Lavinia, sought to publish her sister's poems. She turned to her brother's lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, for assistance, but a feud erupted between the women which resulted in the poems being divided between the two. The poems in Todd's possession were the first to be published; many of them were extensively edited, mostly for punctuation and capitalization, though some were also reworded. Todd published the first volume, Poems, in 1890. Poems: Second Series was published in 1891, followed by the third series in 1896. Each of the three series ran through multiple printings before the turn of the century.
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| Poem XVI: "A Book" |
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| Last Poems |
Housman, A. E. Last Poems. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1922. First printing, first impression. Last Poems was the final poetry collection published by Housman during his lifetime. Errors were found in the book after the 4,000 copies were printed and bound. Housman was fastidious about punctuation and was annoyed by the omission of punctuation marks in the first two lines of poem XXVI, "The half-moon westers low, my love." The chastised publisher offered to insert an errata slip in the remaining copies, but Housman replied, "No, don't put in an errata slip. The blunder will probably enhance the value of the first edition in the eyes of bibliophiles, an idiotic class." The errors were corrected in subsequent impressions. This first impression is identifiable by the lack of a comma at the end of the first line and lack of a semicolon at the end of the second line of page 52.
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| Poem XXVI: "The half-moon westers low, my love" |
This copy belonged to Graham Greene and bears his youthful ownership signature on the front inside cover. Housman's poetry was influential to Greene, and he often quoted Housman in his nonfiction and personal correspondence. In his travel book Journey Without Maps (1936), Greene recounts how he recited poem XL, "Tell me not here, it needs not saying," while trekking through Liberia in 1935. He wrote how the poem:
had a curious fascination for me during those weeks; it was like a succession
of pleasant sounds in a foreign language; it represented the huge difference
between this nature and what I had previously known; I used to reserve it as
a last resort for when I could think of nothing else and recite it very slowly to
myself, wondering whether I had covered a hundred yards between the first
and the last verse.
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| Public School Verse: An Anthology, Volume III, 1921-1922 |
Gilkes, Martin, Richard Hughes, and P. H. B. Lyon, eds. Public School Verse: An Anthology, Volume III, 1921-1922. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923. First edition. Public School Verse was an annual series showcasing poetry by public high school students. The poems were written while the students were still in high school in the academic year 1921-1922, though they may have been in college by the time the anthology was published in 1923. Volume III featured several young writers who went on to notable literary careers such as Peter Quennell, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, and A. L. Rowse. This volume was the first appearance in print together for Greene and Isherwood, who were third cousins. Greene's contribution, "The Gamesters," was never reprinted.
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| The Best Poems of 1925 |
Strong, L. A. G., ed. The Best Poems of 1925. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1925. First edition published concurrently by multiple publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Best Poems of… was an annual anthology of poetry which appeared in some American or British periodical during the year under review. This 1925 anthology contains poems by such recognizable writers as Stephen Vincent Benet, Edmund Blunden, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Vita Sackville-West, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, and W. B. Yeats. Greene's contribution, "A Tramp Finds Himself Inspected By an Owl," first appeared in Westminster Gazette, September 6, 1924.
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| The Grave of Arthur |
Chesterton, G. K. The Grave of Arthur. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. 2 pages. Ariel Poems No. 25. Illustrated by Celia Fiennes. A poem about King Arthur. A large-paper edition printed on English hand-made paper, published concurrently, was limited to 350 copies hand numbered and signed by the author. While the number of copies of the smaller, unsigned edition is unknown, they are as equally scarce as the limited edition for collectors today. The Ariel Poems was a series of booklets, consisting of 38 titles, published between 1927 and 1931. Of the 38 titles, The Grave of Arthur was one of three poems by Chesterton printed in the series. A second Ariel Poems series, published in 1954, consisted of 8 titles.
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| The Seafarer and The Wanderer |
Gordon, I. L., trans. The Seafarer. London: Methuen, 2002. "The Seafarer" is an Old English poem of undetermined authorship and date providing a first-person account of a man alone at sea. It is recorded only in the Exeter Book, an anthology of Old English poetry produced in the late Tenth century. The poem has been translated into contemporary English many times, as far back as Benjamin Thorpe's first English translation in 1842. In the 1920s and 1930s, J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon collaborated on a translation, but the work was left unfinished when Gordon died in 1938. Gordon's wife, Ida, resumed work on "The Seafarer" and published it under her own name in 1960.
Cole, Bethany, trans. The Wanderer. New York: Barnes & Noble Press, 2022. Illustrated by Bethany Cole. Like "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer" is another Old English poem of undetermined origins preserved in the Exeter Book. It, too, has been interpreted many times, and Tolkien and Gordon also collaborated on a translation while working on "The Seafarer." Bethany Cole, while pursuing her Master of Arts in English, was persuaded to read and translate "The Wanderer" from the Old English. She then compared her draft to other modern English translations, including Tolkien's. She found most of them to be plain but felt Tolkien's translation captured the ethos of the poem, which inspired her to revise, illustrate, and publish her own translation.
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| A Quick Look Behind |
Greene, Graham. A Quick Look Behind: Footnotes to an Autobiography. Los Angeles: Sylvester & Orphanos, 1983. Greene quit pursuing a career in poetry following the failure of his first poetry book, Babbling April (1925), but he continued to write poetry throughout his life for himself. He wrote love poems to his mistress, and he wrote poems about significant moments in his life. He did not write these poems intending them to be published, but two friends, the publishers of Sylvester & Orphanos, convinced him to let them publish some of his non-romantic poetry. Because the poems memorialized important personal experiences, he subtitled the book "Footnotes to an Autobiography," as they evoked the emotions rather than the facts of those moments. The poems are arranged in reverse chronological order from the 1980s to the 1920s. The fine press book was published in a limited edition of three hundred signed and numbered copies.
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| Progressive variant bindings |
Shown here are three bindings of the book representing various stages of the publication by bookbinder Bela Blau. The first copy, in a plain beige cloth, was the binder's first bound copy to test aspects of the book and likely used to measure the book for the slipcases which needed to be made. The second copy, in beige cloth stamped with blue flowers, was the original idea for the binding. The publishers rejected it because "it did not print well." This is the binder's dummy copy; it is signed by the author but is out-of-series of the limited edition. The third copy, in blue blind-stamped cloth, is the final product. This is the binder's personal copy; it is signed by the author but is out-of-series of the numbered copies.
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| Bilbo's Last Song |
Tolkien, J. R. R. Bilbo’s Last Song (At The Grey Havens). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. 32 p. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. Within Tolkien's legendarium, "Bilbo's Last Song" is a dramatic lyric Bilbo Baggins is said to have composed as he contemplated his impending death. When Tolkien wrote the poem is unknown, but it was forgotten until 1968 when Margaret Joy Hill, a secretary helping the 76-year-old author move to a new house, discovered it. Tolkien later gifted the publishing rights to Hill as a token of his gratitude. Bilbo's Last Song was first published in book form in English in 1990. Prior to that, it was published in a Dutch translation in 1973, and in English on a poster in 1974.
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| Poems from The Hobbit |
Tolkien, J. R. R. Poems from The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien. This miniature book extracts all of the poems in The Hobbit and illustrates them with 30 of Tolkien's own drawings and paintings.
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| Poems from The Lord of the Rings |
Tolkien, J. R. R. Poems from The Lord of The Rings. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. Illustrated by Alan Lee. Poems and songs composed by the characters are sprinkled throughout The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those poems are extracted and published here in one volume.
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| The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry |
Marius, Richard, ed. The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. First edition. This anthology of Civil War war poetry brings together decades of war and post-war era poetry by northern and southern soldiers, African Americans, and women in one volume. Each poem is prefaced with a vignette by Marius which includes a biography, historical context, or other information about the poem or poet. The poetry is complemented by Civil War photography from the Mathew Brady Collection. This copy is signed by Richard Marius on a tipped in page.
