Antique Rainbow Valley Lucy Maud Montgomery – First Canadian Edition, Green Gables Sequel, WWI Memorial Dedication, Colour Plate Cover 1919

The seventh of the Anne books, bound in green cloth with a colour plate pasted to the front board and another within, both by M. L. Kirk — the Toronto edition of McClelland and Stewart, its copyright line dated 1919, the year the book first appeared.

Two leaves in comes the page one remembers: To the memory of Goldwin Lapp, Robert Brookes and Morley Shier, who made the supreme sacrifice that the happy valleys of their home land might be kept sacred from the ravage of the invader. Three Canadian soldiers, named by a writer who had known their families, standing at the front of a book whose whole action unfolds in the last summers before 1914.

It is the Canadian issue, and the first of them. From 1916, after Montgomery parted from her Boston publisher, her novels came out through McClelland and Stewart in Canada and Frederick A. Stokes in the United States, the American house holding copyright — which is why a Stokes line appears in nearly every copy, wherever it was sold. The title page decides, and this one says Toronto. Two further points settle the printing: the copyright reads 1919 alone, where later McClelland issues carry an erroneous 1923 date, and the colour frontispiece still lies beneath its original tissue guard, as the first issue calls for.

First editions of the Anne novels are collected in earnest, and the Canadian ones are both scarcer than the American and the ones sought on this side of the border. That dedication leaf draws readers who have never collected Montgomery at all, being a piece of remembrance in its own right. The novel is the natural companion to Rilla of Ingleside, which follows these same children into the war, so the two are generally hunted as a pair; and Kirk's plates are collected across her work besides. A first edition worth having for anyone assembling the series properly.