Tag Archives: Robert Frost

Article about the 1974 Boatwright Booknapping appears in UR Mag this month

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52 years later, Marshall Bank’s effort to get Boatwright Memorial Library to protect its rare books is still getting press coverage.

Last year, amidst construction changes, I decided to track down the books Bank had checked out and held hostage, with an eye to doing an exhibit. Working with descriptions and low-quality images from scanned 1970s newspapers, I first created a list of books that were definitively mentioned in the news coverage or could be seen in an accompanying photo.

  • On the right of the two page spread is a woodblock print of a brook with a house off in the distance. The right page is the title page and says "West-Running Brook By Robert Frost" and "New York Henry Holt and Company" the page is signed by frost: "For Westhampton College from Robert Frost 1929."
    Frost, Robert. West-Running Brook. 1928. Inscribed to Westhampton College from the author.
  • Tabb, John B. Later Lyrics. The last stamp is from May 1974, we can assume that was when Bank checked this book out to hold it hostage.
  • Frost, Robert. Selected Poems. This volume contains a bookplate: Edith Goode Memorial Browsing Room, as well as Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in his own hand, “For Westhampton College.”

In a smaller collection, this would have been the end of it, but there were a few twists along the way. Many of the news articles referenced two signed volumes of Robert Frost’s: West-Running Brook and Selected Poems. Among the over 15,000 volumes are two copies of Frost’s West-Running Brook, and they are both signed. Luckily a Collegian article mentioned it was inscribed to Westhampton College, thereby eliminating the volume that just said ‘Richmond 1929.’

Fun Fact: The University Librarian at the time threatened to have Bank’s final grades withheld until the books were returned.

In a 1975 follow-up article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bank is pictured outside BML’s Tower, and even without context, the books he is pictured with are much more modern than the ones he held hostage in 1974. This is because the library had received an anonymous $1,000 donation from someone who supported Bank’s efforts, and in the year after the booknapping, Bank worked to use that money to expand the modern poetry segment of the collection, and he is pictured with those books outside the tower.

  • May Sarton’s “Collected Poems” with her inscription: “For the Bank Modern Poetry Collection.”
  • An inscribed edition of Richard Eberhart’s “Selected Poems” also collected by Bank.

Now that the ground floor has opened, I was able to use my research to mount an exhibit of the books involved in both stages of Bank’s library involvement, and when University Communications reached out about reviving an article about the booknapping, I had the books handy and was able to facilitate their moment in the spotlight. The exact volumes he held hostage, along with certain volumes he collected as part of the “Bank Modern Poetry Collection,” will be on display outside the Galvin Rare Book Reading Room until the end of the semester.

Kitty Hawk

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Still I must have known,
Something in me told me,
Flight would first be flown….
Off these sands of time.

~ Robert Frost, “Kitty Hawk”

Kitty Hawk cover

Kitty Hawk, by Robert Frost

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Brothers achieved success in their desire to fly. The Wright Flyer was the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled sustained flight with a pilot aboard. Having moved to Richmond from Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers, I was delighted to discover “Kitty Hawk” by Robert Frost tucked away in our rare book collection.

This little gem of a book was published as one in a series of Christmas keepsake booklets produced by the publishing firm of Henry Holt and Company. Using Frost’s poem, “Christmas Trees,” in 1934, Holt began an annual custom of sending Robert Frost Christmas booklets. With the exception of the war years of 1939-1944, the Frost/Holt holiday booklet tradition lasted from 1937 until 1962. Although sometimes they used poems which had been previously published, Frost frequently created a new piece especially for the occasion. In 1956, Frost and Holt decided to use a previously unpublished work, “Kitty Hawk,” for the booklet.

Four distinct versions of the poem are known to exist. The first one, at only 128 lines, was published as the 1956 holiday booklet. In November 1957, Frost published a much longer version, at 432 lines. The third version, which incorporated lines from each of the previous versions, appeared in the March 21, 1959, The Saturday Review. The final version, wedding old and new material, was added to his 1962 work, In The Clearing.

Frost was only 29 years old when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and his interest in flying appeared periodically in his work, often referring to the brothers as “the Columbuses of the air.” In his 1936 book, A Further Range, one poem was titled, “The Wrights’ Biplane.” Frost and Orville Wright were friends until Wright’s death in 1948.

The poem itself actually documents an earlier visit to Kitty Hawk made by Frost in 1894, which is listed inside as a subtitle on the piece. Kitty Hawk Frost described the poem in a 1959 interview published, along with the poem, in the 1959 The Saturday Review:

I’ve been gathering together the poems for the book. The main one is “Kitty Hawk,” which is a longish poem in two parts. Part One is a sort of personal story, an adventure of my boyhood. I was down there once when I was about 19. Alone, just wandering. Then I was invited back sixty years later. That return after so long a time suggested the poem to me. I used my own story of the place to take off into the story of the airplane. I make a figure of speech of it: How I might have taken off from my experience of Kitty Hawk and written an immortal poem, but how, instead, the Wright brothers took off from there to commit an immortality….

With Frost’s charming poem and woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi, the Holt booklet is simply charming. “Kitty Hawk” is housed in the Galvin Rare Book Room, and we hope you’ll come and explore this unexpected and beautiful piece.