One of the signature collections in the St. Lawrence University Special Collections is the Frank Piskor Robert Frost collection. Frank Piskor was President of St. Lawrence University from 1969-1981. He was an avid bibliofile who collected a splendid personal library of American literature, which he donated to the St. Lawrence University libraries during his retirement. The central writer in the collection is Robert Frost, and amongst the many volumes by and about Frost are "Christmas Booklets“; individual poems Frost had printed to distribute during the holidays. Joseph Blumenthal’s Spiral Press created them starting in 1929 and going on until 1963. Each booklet was a limited run of a particular poem printed on a letter press, complete with illustrations, and for a little more than half of these booklets it was the first publication of that poem. We have a complete set of the “Christmas Booklets“, and many of them are inscribed by Robert Frost. The illustrations here are from "A Young Birch" published in 1946. Special Collections is open by appointment, please contact Paul Doty (pdoty@stlawu.edu) if you would like to set up a time to see these poems.
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