Robert Frost Inscribed Books
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GUEST:
My father's uncle was a neighbor of Robert Frost in Cambridge, on Brewster Street, and I assume that Robert Frost gave them to him.
APPRAISER:
Now, did you ever meet Frost?
GUEST:
I did once or twice-- this was a long time ago. One time, I recall we came out of my uncle's house and walked down the steps, and there was a lot of snow on the ground, and Robert Frost was walking down the street and we started talking, and he was going to go into Harvard Square, so we gave him a ride into town. They were very good friends.
APPRAISER:
The first book we have is A Boy's Will. Now, that's Frost's first book. It isn't the earliest edition. The first edition was done in London. But it's early in an American edition. But what's really important about this book is when you open it up, is a poem. It's entitled "San Francisco." Now, this was West-Running Brook. It was done a little bit later, in 1928, but here's the same poem, called "A Peck of Gold." Here, it's "San Francisco," here, it's "A Peck of Gold." Frost signed a lot of books. This one is a signed book also. Probably in the value, retail, of a few hundred dollars. A lot of times, he wrote in a stanza, just two or three lines. That can up it to $2,000, $3,000, $4,000. But when you have a whole poem and a poem that has a different title, so there's something unique about this, that even gets better. I would say you're easily talking a $5,000 to $7,000 book, easily, and that might even be conservative on a retail basis.
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