[I]RASBURG — Six months ago in snowy December, Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher wrote a letter to municipal leaders in this speck of a Northeast Kingdom town.
“What an honor it is to present my beloved personal book collection to the Leach Memorial Library in Irasburg,” the 74-year-old began, “where my still-more-beloved wife Phillis and I have now lived for 40 very happy years.”
Mosher noted that the community, founded in 1781 by Ethan Allen’s brother Ira, was the place he penned most of his dozen novels, including “A Stranger in the Kingdom,” based on a 1968 racial attack known as the Irasburg Incident. But his gift, announced at Christmas, wasn’t spurred by the season. Instead, it came after a surprise diagnosis.
“Well, the best laid plans, as they say,” the author posted on Facebook Jan. 22. “In early December I thought I had an upper respiratory bug that has been going around. Well, it didn’t seem to respond to antibiotics, so I had a chest X-ray and a CAT scan that found cancer, and plenty of it.”
Mosher would die a month after the discovery and a week after his social media announcement. But his spirit lived on Friday — on what would have been his 75th birthday — when family and friends gathered to celebrate the new library acquisition and the husband, father and neighbor behind it.
“He had mentioned at previous times he had some books,” library director Laurie Green said, “but we didn’t know he was giving us his entire collection.”
Nor did the one-room depository have any empty shelves to display it. And so Judith Jackson, a member of the board of trustees, charged her husband with building two pine bookcases.
(“I was volunteered and then I volunteered,” Peter Limon confirms.)
“They originally belonged to Mrs. Doris Alexander, the fabled town librarian when Phillis and I first moved to Irasburg,” Mosher wrote in his letter. “On my regular evening walk around the common, I often saw her sitting near her front-room window and reading Dickens. The Alexander family kindly gave me the complete set when Mrs. A passed away. I read many of them to our son and daughter when they were young.”
The Shakespeare volumes, for their part, belonged to Mosher’s grandfather Frank Trapp.
“He died before I was born but my mom — now 102 and herself a 20-year resident of Irasburg — tells me I’m a lot like him,” Mosher wrote in December. (His mother would die Jan. 23, just six days before her son.) “My middle name, Frank, comes from Grandpa Frank Trapp. I use my full name, Howard Frank Mosher, to remember him. (My other grandfather, like me, was a ‘Howard.’)”
Mosher annually greeted spring by talking baseball and brook trout, offering grape jelly to the returning orioles, and rereading Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” nightly before bed. At a library open house Friday, his neighbors also discovered his fondness for diving into contemporary titles, many received from his peers.
Garret Keizer, a Harper’s Magazine contributing editor from the nearby town of Sutton, found the copy of his 2014 book “Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher” he had inscribed: “For Howard and Phillis, writer and teacher extraordinaire — with more thanks than I can say.”
Mosher said the same about his peers: “Taken together,” his letter notes of their work, “they are books from which, along with the classics, I’ve learned all I know about how to put sentences, paragraphs, and stories together.”
Mosher’s collection also boasts a hodgepodge of volumes on nature, the Lewis and Clark expedition (inspiration for his comic novel “The True Account”) and the Civil War (the setting of his “Walking to Gatlinburg”) as well as articles about local history.
“How much,” he wrote in his letter, “has Irasburg itself influenced my own fiction? Immeasurably. The actual incident inspiring ‘A Stranger in the Kingdom’ took place just up the street from our house. The fictional village of Kingdom Common, which appears in most of my books, is largely inspired by Irasburg (with a few notable changes).”
Mosher, however, didn’t elaborate on the differences. His family and friends, for their part, reminisced more about the similarities Friday when they walked from the library, past the town hall, Irasburg’s sole store and post office, to the white clapboard United Church for a standing-room-only memorial service.
“The wild and wooly parts of his books were not always made up out of whole cloth,” Phillis Mosher said of her husband before sharing some of his youthful adventures. “He was a writer from the minute he was born.”
And right up until he died, she continued, noting the author worked eight days and nights after his cancer diagnosis to finish one last manuscript.
“Howard,” she recalled his editor responding, “I will publish this book, and I wouldn’t change a word.”
That novel, “Points North,” is set for release next winter. In the meantime, friends and neighbors can check out his other books at the library.
“I love to write — always have,” Mosher concluded his letter. “And Irasburg and the Kingdom have been a treasure trove of stories. But I live to read. I like thinking that, in the future, some aspiring young storywriter may pick up some of these books and, as I have over the years, find them inspiring and helpful.”
