Book Collecting & 'Traveling Through The Dark'

I've done some research into the copy of Traveling Through The Dark I found at my local used bookstore, and found that it is not a first edition. According to First Editions of Today and How to Tell Them (4th ed., by Wanda Underhill, Berkeley, CA: Peacock Press, 1965), Harper & Row placed the words "First Edition" on the verso (copyright page) of books printed in letterpress. I confirmed that the book was printed with letterpress by the presence of ligatures, or joined characters, a common practice in letterpress to save space and ink.

While these aren't very clear, here is a scan of ligatures from the poem "Elegy" (page 13)--the "f" connected to the next letter in the words "cornfield" and "flower".






And here is the verso, which lacks any mention of the book being a first edition or first printing.





While it would be nice to own a first edition of Stafford's first book to be printed by a major press and the winner of the National Book Award, this volume is in very good condition, and likely worth more than the very reasonable purchase price. But the literary value of the poems themselves is the most rewarding.

to open this book is to spread the curtains wide

I've been pretty busy, and haven't been able to give much time to reading poetry, let alone Stafford. But then yesterday, Stafford came up in a conversation with a friend who knows of my interest in his work. The syllabus for a seminary class this friend and I will be taking together in the fall suggests WS as a possible author to research and present on as a theopoet--a writer whose work engages the imagination and reveals the divine that is within and around all of our daily living. After our conversation, I pulled "The Way It Is" off the shelf for the first time this summer, and happily started reading again. Then just as I begin to think of WS again, he enters my world in an even more tangible, and exciting way.

As I was running errands today in downtown Richmond, Indiana, I thought I'd go browse my local used bookstore. I wasn't planning on making any purchases, but was just interested to see what was there, and if anything new came in I might find worthwhile. I spent my usual five or ten minutes in the religion section, then stepped over to the poetry books. I always check first for any work by Stafford, even though the store owner said he didn't ever sell any Stafford when I had asked a few years back. It's rare that my Stafford searches are successful, but today, my eyes fell on a copy of Traveling Through The Dark, Stafford's 1962 National Book Award winner. The store owner said, jokingly I think, that he might raise the price if I kept saying how amazing of a find it was, so I bought it quickly.

When I got home, I did some looking around online, and found a signed first edition in fine condition for $450. There's no direct evidence that my copy is a first edition (I still need to do some more research on the book and publisher), and the condition is not quite fine (though my untrained eye says it's pretty close), but I would think it would be worth more than the four dollars I payed for it. Whatever it's worth, it's now sitting on my shelf with my growing Stafford collection, but it's too valuable in other ways to just sit there unappreciated. Before I got the book I had read most of the poems in the book in other places, but as I read the title poem from those 1962 pages today, it was a completely new experience. Here's what I wrote soon after I got home from the store.

Upon Finding “Traveling Through The Dark”
by Travis Poling

To open this book is to spread the curtains wide
in the middle of the day; reading
“Traveling Through The Dark” brings
as much light into the room, eyes opening
to images and brightness of what is most real
but barely seen. The yellowed pages
of the first printing years ago is daylight pushing out past
the bookstore two miles away, into my house as I rise early—
this sun calls me to its bright source. In the store I read
of messengers and premonitions, then return the book of angels
to its slot between prayer and scripture, turn again, and step
to the stacks of poetry, scanning the named edges
beside the window.

I happened to find two new sites from the Stafford Archives today as well, William Stafford Archives blog, and StaffordArchives.org.