Antique Anne of Avonlea 1909 Hardcover Book – L M Montgomery, George Gibbs Colour Plate Cover, Green Cloth, Third Impression, Page Boston

Anne's second book, and the one in which she stops being the child of the story and becomes the teacher in it. The cover carries a colour plate of Anne in profile, pasted onto sage-green cloth inside a blind-stamped and gilt frame; the same artist, George Gibbs, drew the frontispiece within. About 367 pages, with the publisher's catalogue leaves still at the back.

Montgomery opened the book with a dedication to Hattie Gordon Smith, the teacher who had encouraged her at Cavendish — a quiet page to come upon, and a pointed one, given that what follows is the book in which Anne takes charge of a classroom of her own. That page is there to be read; it needs no biography to explain it. Two other things survive here that usually do not. The colour plate was pasted onto the cloth rather than printed into it, and is normally the first casualty. The publisher's catalogue at the back is normally the first thing cut away. Both are present, the plate clear and bright.

The copyright leaf records three impressions and dates all three to September 1909. That is what a runaway success looked like: Anne of Green Gables had appeared the year before, and when the sequel came out the electrotype plates went straight back on the press, twice, before the month was out. This copy is the third of those three, not the first.

The imprint matters more than the impression. L. C. Page published the first six Anne books, paid Montgomery roughly a third of what she was owed, and when she left him in 1916 fought her through the courts until 1928. She never went back. Everything under his imprint belongs to the original issue of these titles, and that run closed for good when she walked away.