(WHEELOCK, John Hall and Van Wyck BROOKS)

Verses By Two Undergraduates

First edition. String-tied wrappers. Thin spine nearly invisibly reattached by an expert paper restorer, slightly age-toned, else a fine copy, housed in an old Seven Gables Bookstore envelope with pencil notes by the previous owner that indicates that Wheelock obtained the book from Brooks specifically for the previous owner. The first book of both Wheelock and Brooks, published at their own expense when they were freshmen together at Harvard. Wheelock's poems appear on the versos, Brooks' poems on the rectos. Wheelock has Signed each of his poems at a later date, with in almost every case an explanation of where the poem was written, and what it was about. Brooks has Signed the book at a later date at his poem "The Philosopher." Brooks went on to become an important American historian whose central thesis was that America's Puritan emphasis had resulted in a profound neglect and ignorance of its artistic and intellectual culture. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Flowering of New England. Wheelock graduated from Harvard in 1908 as the Class Poet. After postgraduate study in Europe he joined the publishing firm of Scribner's in 1910, succeeding Maxwell Perkins as Senior Editor upon his death, as well as being an award-winning and influential poet and critic. According to Wheelock in The Last Romantic: A Poet Among Publishers only 100 copies of the book were printed and of these, just six were sold. Many copies of the fragile pamphlet were either destroyed or damaged, so it is somewhat remarkable, and something of a tribute to the tenacity of American librarians, that OCLC references twelve separate copies (under two entries) in American libraries. A rare and fragile literary artifact.

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