The school boy

Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1879. FIRST EDITION. With engraved frontispiece, 25 cuts, and 4 engraved plates. Original decorated cloth over beveled boards, with decorated pictorial end-papers, lightly rubbed at corners, as well as head and foot of spine, small tear to top right corner of top board; some off-set browning and spotting to end-papers, and some light spotting to preliminaries. Bookplate of the “House of Whittemore” tipped in to recto of fly-leaf. First edition of this poem, which was read on June 6, 1878, at the centennial of the founding of Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the school Holmes’ attended as a boy. This, the first published edition, was preceded by a private printing, which bore neither a title page, a title, or the author’s name. BAL, 8931; C&T, p. 169.