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Coffin; Robert P. Tristram : Maine Ballads

The Macmillan Company, New York, 1939

Original publisher's gray cloth binding with gilt lettering on front cover and spine. Front panel of original dust wrapper laid in. Dust wrapper shows an illustrated scene of a town in Maine near the coast. 5 7/8" x 8 5/8." 106 pages, complete. Author's inscription in black ink on the front free endpaper: "For Albert D. Campbell[?] III, With my best wishes, Robert P. Tristram Coffin." Pages and covers of the book are very clean and intact. Binding is tight. Although there is no spine or back panel of the dust wrapper, the front panel and the adjoining front flap are very clean and intact. Front panel of the dust wrapper is not price-clipped. No remainder marks. A Fine copy. Excerpt from the Foreword: "And Maine is full of the makings of ballad stories, too. Even small and common Monday and Tuesday men and women still act literature here, with native humor and pathos, with some sense of pattern, and with the flourish of finality. Maine people still live by the skin of their teeth, on wind pudding and small potatoes and few in a hill. They still live by the weather and their wits. They come to sudden conclusions. They 'up and do things' that are once and for all. And their small adventures in taking part in poetry are not without some dust which comes from rubbing against flowers and the stars. It is such patterns of experience which I have tried to set down in this book, as I have seen them for myself, or heard them told, in a straightforward and spoken style but with that irreducible minimum of adornment which oral literature demands. These verses--the more ambitious of them--are not to be judged by the usual poetic standards. Some of them, judged by such, are little more than doggerel. They are to be judged, both in style and in plot, by the principles of folk design." Titles of the ballads: "Departure," "The Apple Pie," "The Rocker," "Roxiney Boody," "Lazybones," "Jethro's Pet," "When Worthen Plays," "Easter Orr," "The Race," "The Big Voice," "The Spite-Fence," "Toothaker's Desert," "Lomey Catlin," "The Island Wife," "Contry Dance," "The Housekeeper," "The Family Stairs," "The Twins," "The Cross-Roads Grocery-Store," "Hound on the Church Porch," "The Name Kept Green," "The Man Who Broke Three Hearts," "Narrow Escape," "The Sea Was in His House," "A Man," "Black Sheep," "A Mountain Man," "The Dark Horse," "Serenity," "Thomas King," "Farm Boy," "Stonewalls in the Woods," "Wisdom," "The October Drowning," "He Came of a Sea Family," "Aaron Green," "A Kind of Bloom," "San Sebastian," "A Hymn at Night," "The Half-Quintal of Fish," "Coast Church," and "Cows Are Coming Home in Maine.". Book. Book Condition: Fine. Binding: Hardcover

1st Edition
Inscribed by Author(s)