The Diary of a Goose Girl FIRST EDITION

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good +. First Edition. Hardcover. "In alluding to myself as a Goose Girl, I am using only the most modest of my titles; for I am also a poultry maid, a tend of Belgian hares and rabbits, and a shepherdess; but I particularly fancy the role of Goose Girl, because it recalls the German fairy tales of my early youth, when I always yearned, but never hoped, to be precisely what I now am..." Set in rural 19th century Sussex, The Diary of a Goose Girl follows the first-person adventures of a young woman who cuts "the cable that bound [her] to civilisation," leaving her lover and sophisticated city life behind to embrace a new life of rustic charm and self-discovery as a self-proclaimed "Goose Girl" on Thornycroft Farm near the quaint village of Barbury Green. Illustrated throughout in pen-and-ink sketches by Kentish artist Claude A. Shepperson, this delightful story is the work of novelist, composer, and education and children's rights activist Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923), best known for penning the classic Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, published just a year after her Diary of a Goose Girl. Wiggin dedicated this 1902 first edition to the hens, ducks, and geese that inspired the book's loving observations of poultry personalities and antics, including memorable characters like Cannibal Anne (a chicken), Miss Malardina Crippletoes (a duck), and Burd Alane (a "politic, time-serving, pusillanimous goose"). This particular first edition is ex libris Vernon H. Krider (1876-1955), the creator of the thornless "Festival" rose and the farm-born founder of Krider Nurseries, which he grew from a single Indiana orchard into the largest mail order nursery business in the United States at the time, with his bookplate to front pastedown. You can visit The Krider Nursery 1934 World's Fair exhibit to this day in Middlebury, Indiana.

7 5/8" X 5 1/4". [iv], 117pp. Presents nicely in protective archival jacket. Bound in cream-colored cloth over boards, with the titular goose girl and her flock stamped in red, black, white, and orange to upper board, with goose in black, white, and orange to spine, both lettered in black. Very mild wear to binding, with bumping to extremities, faint scattered rubbing, and light dust soiling. Foxing to top edge of text block. Bookplate of Vernon H. Krider to front pastedown. Small stamp to rear pastedown. Binding is firm and sound. Pages show gentle age-toning, heavier to endpapers, with occasional smudge to preliminaries, else clean and unmarked. Illustrated in a tissue-guarded frontispiece and numerous vignettes throughout by Claude A. Shepperson.