American Poetry • First American Edition • Second Issue • Henry Holt • New York 1915

Robert Frost • A Boy's Will • 1915 • New York, Henry Holt

Frost's first book, in original blue gilt-lettered cloth, supplied with a facsimile dust jacket.

Robert Frost's A Boy's Will marks the beginning of his career in book form and remains one of the essential entry points into twentieth-century American poetry. First published in London in 1913, the collection appeared in the United States in 1915, when Henry Holt issued it for the American market. This edition is therefore especially important as Frost's first American edition, recording the moment when his work began to enter the literary landscape that would later claim him as one of its defining voices.

The poems belong to Frost's earlier, more lyrical period, yet they already reveal the tonal control, rural atmosphere, and quiet philosophical pressure that would come to distinguish his mature work. In the collecting history of Frost, A Boy's Will is important not only because it is his first book, but because it preserves the poet before canonization, still newly arrived in print and not yet fixed into the monumental public image that would follow.

This copy is the second issue of the first American edition, identified by the corrected reading "And" — replacing the first issue's misprinted "Aind" — on the final line of page 14. It remains a standard and desirable early Frost printing, especially in original cloth, and offers a bibliographically meaningful example of the poet's earliest American book publication.

Binding

Bound in the original blue cloth, lettered in gilt, and supplied with a facsimile dust jacket. Original dust jackets for early Frost titles are exceptionally scarce and, when present, belong to a very different collecting category; the facsimile jacket restores something of the book's original visual presence while keeping the copy accessible.

Description

FROST, Robert. A Boy's Will. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. First American edition, second issue. ix, [10]-63 pp. 19 × 12.8 cm. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt. Supplied with a facsimile dust jacket.

Condition

Very good overall. Spine darkened, extremities rubbed, volume leaning; ownership inscription, occasional marginal pencil annotations, and pencil writing to rear free endpaper verso. Structurally sound, with the signs of reading and ownership typical of an early twentieth-century poetry volume that remained in use. The supplied facsimile dust jacket is in excellent condition.

A desirable early American Frost, preserving his first book in the form through which it reached his American readership.