The first and last first editions, the second the ?third printing of 1919, first published 1917. All three in bindings for Thomas Rénaud Rutter, and each signed and inscribed by Lindsay on the first blanks, the first to Renaud's mother, Mrs. Louise Warren Rutter, with her bookplate to verso of the front free endpaper facing; the second with "My most fraternal good wishes to Thomas Rutter"; the last "Good wishes and good will to Thomas Rutter" with the first three lines from Lindsay's ambiguous pæan to the city of both his and Rutter's birth, "Magical Springfield": "In this - the city of my discontent/Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass/ Romance, romance is here", initialled verso of the front free endpaper. Both of these with Rutter's nautically-themed bookplate. Springfield native Thomas Rénaud Rutter, the son of tea importer and engineer J.E.T. Rutter, was a Princeton-educated lawyer who at one time served on the staff of the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army, before becoming an attorney for the American Sugar Refining Co. He retired to California in 1927, sometime commodore of the Newport Beach Yacht Club. All of the inscriptions are dated May 12 1921 in Plainsfiled, NJ, home town of his wife Abbie, née Holstein. A not unattractively, if rather stiffly, bound group of the works of the "Prairie Troubadour", who was famed for his declamatory, performance poetry, with a pleasing Springfield association.
The post Group of three inscribed works. appeared first on Peter Harrington.