Raptis Rare Books has recently listed for sale a copy of Alice Turner Curtis's A Little Maid of Vermont formerly belonging to Sylvia Plath. The book was given to Plath by her mother Aurelia Schober Plath with an inscription date of 10 February 1941, when the Plaths were still living in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The price is $12,500 . The book comes with a four-page handwritten letter of provenance by Wellesley neighbor Cara Cruickshank.  The catalog description reads: "Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Company, 1927. "First edition of the author’s children’s classic; from the library of Sylvia Plath. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated by Grace Norcross. Presentation copy, inscribed by Sylvia Plath’s mother on the front free endpaper, “Feb. 10, 1941 To my sweetheart, Sylvia from Mommy” and with her father, Otto Plath’s, embossed library stamp. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, was a second-generation American of Austrian d...

One of the things I did in 2020 was read all the books on my shelves that I had not read. As well, I read some "classics" that I could borrow from the library. A number of these were inspired by Sylvia Plath who was a far better reader of books than I will ever be.  It started right at the turn of the 2019-2020 New Year when I read Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago . Plath read that on her week-long trip from the US to England in December 1959. It took me about month and I read it, in part, from my hometown to Seattle and back! Then, around the time of the shutdown in March, I read Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground.  And I decided that I can and should read only Russian novel per year. Next was W. B. Yeats' "The Unicorn from the Stars", the play that featured some lines that Plath saw as prophecy in November 1962.  I moved onto Lawrence ( The Rainbow , Women in Love , Lady Chatterley's Lover ), Austen's Northanger Abbey and Brontë's Villette . T...

Yale University's Beinecke Library recently acquired four books from Sylvia Plath's library. Three of the books originated in that big March 2018 auction held by Bonhams . Two are by R.S. Thomas: Song at the Year's Turning (1960);  Tares (1961)  Both have birthday inscriptions by Ted Hughes from October 1961. Please note a presentation copy from R. S. Thomas to Plath and Hughes is held by Emory. The third is  The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins  (1949). Another book now at Yale, and likely from the auction, is About Sylvia produced by Enid Mark, Plath's former classmate at Smith College. The fourth book is  The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas , formerly belonging to the late Elizabeth Sigmund. This book sold  via Bonhams auction in June 2019 . The winner was  Peter Harrington Rare Books in London , who flipped it to Yale. In sum, the Beinecke has a very strong collection of Sylvia Plath books. Each of these has been updated in Sy...

Sylvia Plath's copy of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1956) is another of the books from her personal library held by Smith College and open for research. Her copy was the second impression, February 1956. Her ownership inscription on the front free endpaper reads, "Sylvia Plath, 1956". The play debuted in London at the Arts Theatre on 3 August 1955 and shortly thereafter transferred to the Criterion Theatre, which is where Plath saw in on 20 September 1955, mere hours after landing at Southampton earlier in the day. Her pocket calendar, held by the Lilly Library that likely no seconds were wasted in exploring her new city and country: Breakfast at 7 on board the ship; photographed in a group by Evening Standard ; customs; train to London (Waterloo); bus to Regents Park; attended speeches and teas; dinner with Carl Shakin, her "shipboard romance"; and then Waiting for Godot . In her 25 September 1955 letter to her mot...

Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to work with Sylvia Plath's copy of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead which is held privately. Sylvia Plath's library is largely divided between three major collections: Emory University, Indiana University, and Smith College. For several years now I have maintained a reconstruction of Plath's library (if you will) via LibraryThing as a part of their Legacy Library project. This list includes books not only owned by Plath at the time of her death, but also books Plath mentioned in her letters and journals, as well as those that appear in papers she wrote and other archival documents. There is still work to be done in the project so check her catalog periodically. The three main collections can be looked at the following way: those at Indiana University were books that Plath left behind when she moved permanently to England in December 1959; those at Smith College were books Plath had with her in England at the time of her ...