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

On the front free endpaper, written in brown period ink, is the line Elizabeth. Dec. 25 1903. The book had been published that spring, so it was given away as a Christmas present in its very first season, and the inscription has travelled with it ever since.

The binding is green cloth with a picture blocked straight into the weave: a grey-roofed cottage, hollyhocks climbing the left side, and below the title a small landscape of road and field. Each colour was stamped from its own die, one pass at a time, and somewhere along the hollyhocks a die has landed a hair off register, leaving a sliver of bare cloth showing. The lettering is pressed deep enough to feel beneath a thumb.

The title page reads Kate Douglas Wiggin · Houghton, Mifflin and Company · The Riverside Press, Cambridge · 1903, the first year of publication. Wiggin's Maine farm girl was an immediate favourite that season and has kept her place beside Jo March and Anne Shirley since, reaching the screen more than once, Shirley Temple included.

The book still carries its printed dust jacket, bearing the title, the author and the original $1.25 price, now housed inside an archival cover. Jackets of 1903 were thrown away by the thousand, so to find one at all is fortunate. Whether this one left the shop with the book or joined it later I cannot promise, and the same caution applies to the printing: the 1903 title page and binding are certain, the first printing is not.

The cloth is sound and square with its colour still bright, and inside there is age foxing and some light staining, honest enough in a book kept and read for a hundred and twenty years. A lovely thing for a collector of girlhood classics or of Edwardian pictorial bindings, and far better company on a shelf than any modern reprint.