PART VII

Edited by Roger E. Stoddard

"Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), pioneer collector of first editions by New England authors, was twice the subject of privately-printed collectors' guides ... A clever minor poet, sometime editor of The Atlantic Monthly, author of the admired tale "Marjorie Daw," Aldrich brought freshness and candor to the American boy's book with his The Story of a Bad Boy (1869, 70). That evocation of his childhood in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, inspired his friends C.D. Warner, W.D. Howells, and S.L. Clemens to follow suit with some eminent results."

Edited by Joan St.C. Crane

"Louise Guiney was a meticulous scholar and fastidious in the use of words, but she did not regard herself or her work very seriously. She was unencumbered with ambition beyond a desire to salvage the eclipsed reputations of other worthies (Robert Emmett, Hurrell Froude, Henry Vaughan, Lady Danvers, Katherine Philips). ... Success and its attendant fame were to her a bit of a joke. Ultimately, she achieved a virtue she most admired, enunciated in 'The Precept of Peace': la divine indifference."

Edited by John Lancaster

"In contrast to most of the authors Howe collected, Robert Frost's life overlapped considerably with that of the collector. This portion of the collection is thus particularly rich in ephemera, some of it presented and inscribed by the author to Howe ...
The centerpiece of the collection is certainly the heavily-edited typescript of 'Education by Poetry.' This philosophical statement has been printed in several versions, all of them different in important ways from one another and from the Howe version, which remains to be studies carefully."