Vintage Anne of Green Gables Facsimile of the 1908 Edition – Sealed Nimbus Classics Hardcover, L.M. Montgomery, Illustrated PEI Book, 1992

A hardcover Anne of Green Gables, still sealed in its factory shrink-wrap. The boards are green, with a printed panel laid across the front: Anne in profile beneath a russet hat, the white house with its green gables standing behind her, the whole drawn in the flat blocked colour and heavy black outline of an Edwardian cover. A small badge in the corner reads Facsimile of the 1908 edition.

That badge describes the book precisely. The cover art, the typesetting and the illustrations all reproduce Anne as she appeared when L.C. Page of Boston published her in 1908, so the volume carries the look and the feel of her first year, faithfully set down.

The reproduction was printed in 1992 by Nimbus Publishing, one of Canada's oldest independent houses, based in Nova Scotia. Anne being Prince Edward Island's most celebrated resident, there is a pleasing symmetry in a Maritime publisher having been the one to put her first edition back into print.

Sealed and unread, its boards crisp and square with no knocks to the corners, it seems to have gone from the press to a shelf and stayed there. A tidy gift for an Anne devotee, an L.M. Montgomery reader, or anyone drawn to Prince Edward Island and its most famous redhead.