Something New: Robert Frost's Lost Poem

A Rare Book Dealer Makes Literary History During a Routine House Call

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The Discovery of Robert Frost’s Lost Poem

Today, the New Yorker magazine published its centennial issue, and in its pages readers will find something extraordinary: a previously unknown Robert Frost poem. Frost’s biographer, Jay Parini, wrote an essay about the poem, saying it “was found in a retired educator’s home library by a family friend, a book dealer, following the educator’s death.” This is the rest of that story.

The book dealer was Ed Smith, now semi-retired, who noticed the poem during a routine house call near Puget Sound, in Washington. For those of us who make our living hunting for books, unearthing a piece of literary history is something we daydream about.

Ed’s discovery wasn’t just luck. In the rare book trade, we develop a feeling for books. Two of the grand dames of American bookselling, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, tried to dignify this skill with the German term, Fingerspitzengefühl, which means “fingertip feeling.”

Book dealers in the U.S. don’t know much German. Most of us mangle the pronunciation so badly that we end up sputtering something that sounds like “Finger Spit” followed by several vaguely Teutonic syllables. We should call it a spidey sense, but after spending our careers looking down our noses at comic books, rare book dealers can hardly start using superhero terminology now.

The truth is, this instinct for the valuable, rare, and interesting isn’t a superpower at all. It is just pattern recognition honed by handling thousands and thousands of books. Eventually, you don’t see the regular books on a shelf; your eye skips right past them to the one that matters.

The secret to spotting great material is having an open mind while “not really looking for something,” Ed said. His recent discovery of the Frost poem confirmed this philosophy. “I look at it this way,” he told me. “If you think you are going to win, you’re dead meat already.”

Ed never thought he would end up as a rare book dealer, and he definitely didn’t go looking for it. Now he has forty years of experience, even if he started his path to bookselling late and about as far from the trade as you can get—he indentured as a masonry apprentice in 1966, and spent 27 years in construction.

While age is beginning to creep up on him, Ed is still a big guy, and it’s not hard to imagine him moving tons of bricks and stone each day under a burning sun or in the winter cold. Yet his physical presence is gentle and not threatening.

Ed Smith, a bookseller on Bainbridge Island, Washington

He didn’t read much as a young man. Charles Bukowski’s poems in the Los Angeles Free Press made an impression, and then he found Hunter S. Thompson. Bukowski spoke to Ed’s blue-collar experience and Thompson’s anti-authoritarianism resonated with his own.

Ed shared another sensibility with these iconoclastic writers. “Bukowski just loved the juice,” he said during one of our phone calls, a hint of recognition in his voice. Later, in a reflective moment, he added Richard Brautigan, a third writer who had trouble with the bottle, to his list of favorites. Unlike his literary heroes, Ed found his way clear of drinking, but those writers still inspire him. You don’t have to talk with Ed very long before he’ll bring one of them up in conversation.

In another life, I can imagine Ed as a working-class poet. He thinks in unconventional images and metaphors.

I wanted to draw a line between masonry and book scouting for this Dispatch. I wondered if the repetitiveness of bricklaying induced the same meditative state that booksellers can go into while scanning shelves. Ed didn’t make much of my analogy between his two professions. “I see no connection,” he wrote an email. Then he told an anecdote that defies straightforward interpretation, a fragment of experience that suggests more than it reveals.

“We have a cat, Mavis,” he began. “It is not our cat. The cat belongs to a Baptist preacher and his family who live a few houses down from us.” One day the cat, which had been aloof, “came in and made a beeline to me on the bed,” he continued. “She jumped on my chest and immediately went to sleep. You could have heard her snoring all the way down to Portland. Before coming here the preacher lived in Alabama.”

I have puzzled over this tale for days. While its precise meaning remains opaque, I feel it encapsulates Ed’s worldview, a realm where cause and effect are connected by a mechanism beyond logic. It’s like the central myth of his ancestors in the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, where Ed is an enrolled member. In the legend of the tribe, the ocher they mixed with bear grease to paint pictographs came from a fight between a chipmunk and Sasquatch.

In 1970, Ed’s number came up in the draft, and he joined the Marines. He requested duty in Vietnam, in the way of young men who crave excitement and can’t yet comprehend death. It was a common impulse during the war. The military also drafted my father, and he grew so bored in Vietnam that he volunteered for helicopter duty, despite having a wife and child back home. Fortunately, my father’s eyesight kept him grounded and far from Viet Cong snipers, while Ed, the trained marine looking for adventure, spent most of his war years bumming around Los Angeles.

The Marine Corps, with bureaucratic efficiency straight out of Catch-22, assigned Ed, a skilled builder, to operate a mainframe at a base in Santa Ana. “Not that I was some sort of computer genius,” he said. “I just pushed the buttons that they told me to push.”

Between shifts in the computer room, he moonlighted as a bricklayer, earning a few hundred dollars a week. Paranoia stalked his days off. Not fear of the MPs, mind you. The real threat was the bricklayers local discovering his non-union jobs.

At the end of two years in the service, Ed returned to masonry full time, sometimes building hotels and sometimes putting in the fireplaces for an entire subdivision. His final project, in the early 1990s, was a new prison being built near his home in Ojai, California. By then, he’d already begun his transformation into a bookseller with a small shop open between projects.

I asked about his unlikely shift from bricklaying to bookselling, and Ed couldn’t quite explain it. He started collecting Bukowski about 1980 and fell in love with books. It could be fate, or perhaps it was just an accident. “You get to one place,” he said, “and then you get to another place.”

Bookselling drew Ed in because, as he put it, “no matter how good you are, fast you are, or how much money you have, you’re never going to get it all.”¹ He saw an industry where even the most established dealers couldn’t corner the market, leaving opportunities for newcomers to carve out their own space.

Expanding from the short-lived shop in Ojai, Ed developed an interest in original movie scripts. He also pursued photography books and modern first editions. He learned from experience and lived by his wits. “I’d have to take the rest of the day to tell you about all the scripts I’ve found,” he said. Over the years, he also appraised the book collection of Jacques Lowe, JFK’s personal photographer, and the archive of Hunter S. Thompson, who asked for Ed’s help valuing his manuscripts.

The antiquarian’s intuition that Ed has honed through decades of buying and selling books came into play in 2022 when he was called to look at an estate on Bainbridge Island. He has lived on the island, a thirty-five minute ferry ride across Elliott Bay from Seattle, for the last twenty-five years.

The executor had selected what appeared to be the valuable books, arranging them for Ed and other booksellers to review. As soon as Ed walked in, he quickly dismissed these impressive-looking leatherbound books as having little value. He turned his attention instead to the built-in bookcases in the home’s great room. His initial impression was that “there wasn’t one book that was worthy of five dollars.”

North of Boston with the only known copy of Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing New”

Within the first few minutes of browsing, Ed saw “North of Boston” etched in gilt on a blue-gray spine. The book is one of Robert Frost’s important early poetry collections. “It was a pretty copy,” Ed recalled. “Although it didn’t have a jacket. I pulled it out to see what printing it was, and there it was.”

The “it” in this case was a short poem titled “Nothing New” copied out on the front free endpaper. The book turned out to be a later printing worth maybe $25 in a used bookstore, except for Frost’s signature and the poem. “Nothing New” isn’t included in North of Boston. Ed did a quick Internet search to determine where it had been published. Nothing came up.

The title of the newly discovered Robert Frost poem.

He took pictures, and as soon as he got home from the house call, Ed started looking for Frost experts to consult. Personally, I wouldn’t have had the temerity to contact English professors without doing a lot more research. Ed shrugged at my reticence. “You get a hunch for these things, and you just have to follow it.”

He reached Robert Faggen, a professor at Claremont McKenna College,² by phone. Ed worried that his story seemed unbelievable, so he blurted out the news about an unpublished Frost poem before Faggen could have a chance to hang up. Faggen said email it, and Ed sent a photo.

“He called me back immediately,” Ed said. “So I figured it was something special.”

Faggen has written a number of books on Frost, including a monograph about Charles Darwin’s influence on the New England poet. He also edited some of Frost’s letters and his notebooks. “I was stunned when Ed called me,” Faggen told me recently. “God knows I know that handwriting,” he said, recalling years of reading Frost’s craggy script. “The authentication process did not take long.”

Frost wrote hundreds of poems, but his process was controlled, and according to Faggen, he typically destroyed his working drafts. As a result, unknown and unpublished Frost poems don’t turn up very often. The last time one surfaced was in 2006.³ That poem, “War Thoughts at Home,” made national news and the Virginia Quarterly Review devoted sixteen pages to the announcement. Like “Nothing New,” Frost wrote that poem in a copy of North of Boston and in the same year, 1918.

“Nothing New” is, in Faggen’s opinion, “more interesting” than the poem found in 2006. It is a melancholy meditation on memory and time that begins with an everyday moment, a spray of “dust” (as in a dusting of snow) in the speaker’s face. In just eight lines, Frost moves from this concrete experience to recollections of childhood, dreaming, and the cyclical nature of life, where everything is fresh and yet nothing is new.

I commented to Faggen that the poem starts with a deceptively simple rhyme before taking an unexpected turn that feels surprisingly modern for a poem written more than a hundred years ago. Faggen said this layered quality was part of the enduring interest in Frost. “His language is so modern,” he said. “He’s approachable, but when you get into him, he gets very complicated.”

Photo from NewYorker.com

Faggen wasn’t ready to speculate on exactly how the poem ended up in the book. “I don’t think this is a rough draft,” he said. “It looks very deliberate.” Frost probably wrote an initial version that is now lost, “but he had it in his head” one day and put it down in the book. Why and for whom, no one knows.

Parini, writing for the New Yorker, suggests that perhaps Frost, when selecting poems for his book, New Hampshire, the first of four books that would win the Pulitzer Prize, “glanced at ‘Nothing New’ and decided it wasn’t quite equal to the best in his sequence of aphoristic poems.” The biographer thinks Frost was too hard on himself. “I wish he’d included it, and I’m glad we have it now; it has grace notes I would not like to lose.”

The executor of the estate that now owns this copy of North of Boston has no idea where his father got the book. His father had attended Amherst College and had Frost as a professor following the Second World War, more than thirty years after Frost inscribed the book. Now and then he talked about meeting the great American poet; he never mentioned the book.

The executor, who requested anonymity to preserve his family’s privacy, thinks his father didn’t know the poem was in the book. He certainly “didn’t know there was a poem in there that was unpublished. Or if he did know, he forgot about it.”

Faggen put Ed and the heirs in touch with Frost’s literary executor, who arranged for “Nothing New” to be published in the New Yorker. Faggen hopes that this discovery will keep people looking in their books. Another new Frost poem could turn up.

Ed has been quietly gauging the value of this one-of-a-kind book, and he is hoping to find the right buyer. How much would a collector or library pay to have the only surviving manuscript of a Frost poem? He received an estimate of $8,000 to $12,000, and it could go much higher.

Ed is philosophical about his role in the preservation of literature. He likened being a bookseller to working at the checkstand at a grocery store. “You’re just the bag man,” he said. “The one who puts the groceries in the sack,” momentarily handling a book before conveying its ownership from one person to another.

Since discovering “Nothing New,” Ed keeps answering calls about old books, optimistic that something great might come his way again. “It doesn’t happen all the time,” he said. “But it happens enough.”

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. Quoted from Ed Smith’s segment in the ABAA interview series.

2. Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature.

3. A decade ago, Amherst College announced a newly discovered “collaborative poem,” supposedly written by Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost. Faggen said he wasn’t convince that Frost and Lindsay had written the poem together.