MERRILL, James | Jim's Book

Merrill, James. Jim’s Book. New York: privately printed, 1942.

8vo.; red cloth-backed grey boards; titles to front board in gilt, top edge red. With the original glassine jacket; medium chip at tail; tiny chip at top rear corner. 

First edition, first printing. Inscribed on the front free endpaper: “for little Peter Gillis on his FIRST BIRTHDAY from the teenage author / James Merrill / 1942–1993 / Stonington”. 

James Merrill is recognized as one of the leading poets of 20th-century American letters. Praised for his stylish elegance, moral sensibilities, and transformation of autobiographical moments into deep and complex meditations, Merrill’s work spans genres—including plays and prose—but the bulk of his artistic expression can be found in his poetry. Over the long course of his career, he won nearly every major literary award in America. Merrill was born in 1926 in New York City, the son of investment banker Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm and Helen Ingram Merrill, a society reporter. As a boy, Merrill enjoyed a highly privileged upbringing in educational and economic terms. His father's 30-acre estate in Southampton, New York, for example, known as “The Orchard,” had been designed by Stanford White with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted. Merrill’s interest in language was first piqued by his governess—a Prussian-English widow called Mademoiselle who was fluent in both German and French. 

From 1936 to 1938, Merrill attended St. Bernard's, a prestigious New York grammar school.  Merrill's parents separated when he was eleven, then divorced when he was thirteen. As a teenager, Merrill boarded at the Lawrenceville School, where he befriended future novelist Frederick Buechner, began writing poetry, and undertook early literary collaborations. When Merrill was 16 years old, his father collected his short stories and poems and published them as a surprise under the name Jim's Book. Merrill once noted to a rare book dealer that his father had it done as a surprise: “I wish I could be sure how many copies – 500? 300? I have never tried to suppress it – it gives me no pleasure, on the other hand, & I'd just as soon it went unread – stuff written when I was 15-16, you understand. . .”  While the exact number of copies is not known, it has remained one of more notable rarities in modern poetry. Hagstrom & Bixby A1