ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Boston: L.C. Page, January 1920, original cloth boards, pp. viii, [2], 429, + advertisements, frontispiece with tissue guard, illustrated with 24 b&w film stills from the lost silent picture.  Condition VG with binding cleaned and resewn, cloth somewhat faded, cover illustration rubbed, occasional thumbing and light soiling, no rips or tears.  Book is complete, with all preliminaries, text pages, illustrations, and ads present and attached in sound, tight binding.  

Excepting the April 1908 first edition, this rare printing is the most desirable edition of Lucy Maud Montgomery's beloved novel because it features stills from the lost 1919 silent film starring Mary Miles Minter.  No prints of the movie survive today; all copies were reportedly destroyed after its director, William Desmond Taylor, was murdered.  The murder was never solved, but Minter was initially suspected of being connected with the crime and her acting career never recovered.  The film survives solely through a handful of promotional stills and the plates illustrating this volume, which was a special printing issued by L.C. Page a few weeks after the film premiered on November 23rd, 1919.

Minter named Anne Shirley as her favorite role, but Lucy Maud Montgomery saw the film shortly after its release and complained about its deviations from the text, including an episode with a skunk. (There were no skunks on Prince Edward Island at the time.)  Contemporary reviews proved more favorable, with Minter earning considerable praise for her performance as the young heroine.

Fans of the classic tale may hope that a lost print of the film will someday be found, but in the meantime these 24 plates, 12 of which are shown in this listing, will have to do.  For those accustomed to the standard illustrations in all other L.C. Page editions, the prints will be oddly refreshing and may provoke a smile.  Anne and Diana certainly do not look like pre-teens, Marilla has a rather severe appearance, and Gilbert Blythe is a full grown, handsome young man.

There are a few other copies with "Forty-eigth Impression, 344th Thousand" to be found on the internet, but they all have the usual illustrations done by M.A. and W.A.J. Claus.  Although the exact print run is unknown, this rare movie edition likely had a very limited production — WorldCat lists just seven copies in libraries worldwide.

Ships from the United States.