BUMBLEBEES AND THEIR WAYS
Rare inscribed first edition of this classic study of the lives, loves, and passionate crimes of the Bee, by the father and sometime literary subject of Sylvia Plath, poet and beekeeper.
Very good plus.
Price: $2,000.00
BUMBLEBEES AND THEIR WAYS
"The sting of bees took away my father / who walked in a swarming shroud of wings" — Sylvia Plath, "Lament"
Otto Plath was a biology professor and entomologist with particular expertise in bees and beekeeping, an interest that began in boyhood. BUMBLEBEES AND THEIR WAYS was the sole book he published during his lifetime; Otto died (from complications from diabetes) when his daughter was just eight years old, and Plath most famously addressed their relationship in her controversial poem "Daddy." But references to bees, both literal and metaphorical, appear throughout her work, perhaps especially in the five poems of her bee sequence, folded into the center of ARIEL by Ted Hughes's reordering. They were originally intended as the conclusion to that book and the occasion of her exuberant declaration in 1962 that "I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name." Earlier that year, the couple had become beekeepers, Plath writing to her mother that the furiously unboxed new bees, obeying some unfailing instinct, had swarmed Hughes and crawled in his hair but left her unstung. In the final bee poem, "Wintering," in the slow "time of hanging on for the bees," they wait cold and quiet: "Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires / To enter another year? / What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? / The bees are flying. They taste the spring."
BUMBLEBEES in an uncommon book on the market, and is especially so signed. This copy is inscribed to Conrad Rohe, who sold the Plaths their house at 92 Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, MA in 1937. The house had been built for Rohe just half a block from the ocean in the mid to late 1920s and the Plath family lived at the house until 1942. The house loomed large in the young Sylvia Plath's imagination: "Sylvia would have felt the bracing wind of the sea from her earliest days [...] She would have seen the change as it refracted off the ocean over the course of an afternoon [...] She would have heard the sound of gulls constantly. It was here that she chose to sanctify her earliest memories, here that she began an infatuation with the sea that would become a touchstone throughout her life" (Clark 36).
Already a scarce book, this an association copy with important resonance in and influence on a major 20th-century poet.
Read more: Clark, Red Comet:The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath; Kilkenny, "The Ending Sylvia Plath Wanted," The Atlantic; Montaut, "Sylvia Plath and the Bees," Dublin Beekeepers Association.
The Object
First printing. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934. 8.5'' x 6''. Original gilt-stamped blue cloth. Color frontispiece. Color plates and additional black-and-white illustrations. Lacking original dust jacket. 201, [1] pages. Inscribed by Otto Plath on front free endpaper "Mr. Conrad Rohe / with the compliments of O. E. Plath." Light edgewear and scuffing to extremities, spine faintly sunned.
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