Robert Frost Collection includes photos inscribed by the poet
Imagine looking at a 50-year-old photograph of an apple tree. On the image is a spidery fountain pen inscription: “Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough/ but I am done with apple picking now. R.F. to L.M.”
The man who wrote these words and the person for whom they were written are done with apple picking, with writing, and with collecting. The R.F. in these lines is none other than Robert Frost, who inscribed the photo to his friend and chronicler, Louis Mertins.
The Bancroft Library’s Louis Mertins Collection of Robert Frost contains many rare and important items, including some 30 photographs. Many of these pictures are of Frost and are inscribed by Frost to Mertins. Others are scenes from Frost’s life, including his homes and haunts: Little Iddens in England; the garden at Ripton, Vermont; and Derry Farm in New Hampshire.
This collection and its unique inscriptions caught my eye while working on a project funded by NHPRC (National Historical Publications and Records Commission) to create online collection level catalog records for the pictorial collections at Bancroft.
One of the highlights of the survey was opening a folder to find photographs taken by Mertins bearing lines of verse in Frost’s hand. Most of them are also annotated on the back in Mertins’ hand. One example is a photo of a tree at the edge of a meadow captioned, “Tree at my window/ window tree R.F. to L.M.” with Mertins’ note, “Leaning birch at Frost’s Derry Farm.”
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Another is a photograph of a stone wall and trees, inscribed “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Robert Frost to Louis Mertins,” and on verso, “The wall at the Derry Farm – made famous in ‘Mending wall’.”
One of Frost’s well-known poems appears illustrated by a photo of a dirt road under a canopy of trees captioned, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. R.F. to L.M.” with Mertins’ note, “The Road not Taken at Derry Farm.”
Louis Mertins was a poet and admirer who became Robert Frost’s friend and frequent host from 1932 until Frost’s death in 1963. Throughout their friendship Mertins kept a diary of their conversations, which formed the basis for his 1965 biography of Frost, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking, which includes some of these photographs without their inscriptions. Mertins and his wife, Esther Nicolene Mertins, also published a critical bibliography, The Intervals of Robert Frost, in 1947.
In 1958 the Mertins presented to the University of California a large and varied collection of Robert Frost material during a University meeting at which Frost was the keynote speaker. It included manuscripts, letters, signed first editions, Christmas cards, ephemera, and these photographs bearing inscriptions. Mrs. Mertins has added to this collection at various times since 1958, most recently in 1987.
Charles Faulhaber, Director of The Bancroft Library, suggested I solicit expert opinion about the place of this material in the documentation of Frost’s life and work. Writing to one person opened the gates to communication with many. All indicated that in their collections of Frost photographs (containing many more Frost images than the Mertins collection), the few that are signed bear little more than a signature or initials.
Robert Frost in 1935 |
Peter J. Stanlis, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Rockford College, Rockford, Ill. wrote: “[The collection is] quite different from the photographs in the large collections on Frost in the Dartmouth College libraries, the Amherst College Library, the Jones Library in Amherst, and the University of Virginia Library. Your holdings have far more photos actually signed by Frost. . . . Also, Frost did not usually inscribe lines from his poems on photographs. . . . I believe that the Mertins collection is important partly because it is unique in having so many items signed by Frost. It is a vital part of the iconography of Robert Frost.”
Donald G. Sheehy, editor of Robert Frost Poems, Life, Legacy (a CD ROM), added: “I would say it is very unlikely that any other such body of material exists. Frost did, of course, sign and occasionally inscribe photographs of himself for friends and collectors, but not with lines or paraphrases from the poems as he would for books.”
All the Frost experts confirmed that photographs inscribed by Robert Frost are quite rare, and that photographs bearing lines of verse are almost unheard of. While this is surprising, it does confirm the importance of the Mertins collection as a whole.
As a Bancroft staff member, one of the most rewarding aspects of the NHPRC project was looking at the pictures themselves as part of our cataloging work flow. Without this hands-on human interaction with the collections, important details like the inscriptions on the photographs in the Mertins collection might have gone unnoted.
Faulhaber, himself a literary scholar, underscores the importance of this collection for scholarship: “Materials like these are extremely significant, even though critics have long since abandoned the notion that there exists a one-to-one correspondence between an image, a place, a building, and their literary representation. It is still important for us to know, with as much specificity as possible, the physical realities that inspired a writer, particularly a poet like Frost, whose work is rooted in the austere landscapes of New England.”
Charis Baz Takaro is an Electronic Publishing
Assistant in Bancroft’s Technical Services unit.
Volume 112
Spring 1998
Table of Contents
DeFeo, Conner papers add to Bancroft’s Beat collection
From the Director: What does Bancroft collect?
The Digital Scriptorium
Towards a Renaissance in medieval manuscript studies
Robert Frost Collection includes photos inscribed by the poet
Bancroft Fellows research images of the American West, history of Mexico’s Cora Indians
Freshmen discover the wonders of Bancroft
Bancroft staffer in the spotlight
An Oral History of Jack Stauffacher From letterpress to computer-designed fine printing
Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?
