Antique Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm First Edition – Kate Douglas Wiggin, Houghton Mifflin Green Pictorial Cloth, Dust Jacket, Inscribed 1903

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in its first year and first printing: Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, the Riverside Press, 1903 — a small 12mo of about 328 pages in green cloth blocked with a grey-roofed cottage and climbing hollyhocks, each colour stamped from its own die, the lettering pressed deep enough to feel beneath a thumb. On the front free endpaper, in period ink, runs the line Elizabeth. Dec. 25 1903: published that spring, the book was given away as a Christmas present in its very first season, and the line has travelled with it since.

This copy is the first printing, and it keeps its original dust jacket — the one it left the shop in — bearing the title, the author and the publisher's $1.25 price, now housed under an archival cover. That survival is the rare part: jackets of 1903 were treated as wrapping paper and thrown away by the thousand, so a first printing still in its own jacket is the scarce survival rather than the rule, and on this one the spine panel is complete enough to read across the room.

Wiggin's Maine farm girl was an immediate favourite of her season and has kept her place beside Jo March and Anne Shirley since, reaching the screen more than once, Shirley Temple included. This copy carries the three things that so rarely survive together: the first printing, the jacket it was sold in, and the date it was given.