My favorite Anne of Green Gables editions
In 1936, Lucy Maud Montgomery surprised and delighted readers by publishing Anne of Windy Poplars, her first Anne of Green Gables novel in 15 years. It was a gap-filling novel, telling of the three-year period in Anne’s life between the third book, Anne of the Island, and Anne’s House of Dreams.
Its publication prompted reprint publisher Grosset & Dunlap to reissue most of the Anne books that year with new dust jacket designs that are among the most beautiful…
and the most bizarre…
ever to grace the series.
Vibrant colors, bold brush strokes, and wistful facial expressions abound.
But what’s perhaps most noteworthy about them is how anachronistic they are.
The clothing and hairstyles are contemporary ones, rather than what you’d expect of books set in the Victorian and Edwardian eras around the turn of the 20th century. Puffed sleeves and architectural coiffures are nowhere to be found in these depictions of Anne.
They also give off a strong, melodramatic romance vibe, which isn’t quite how Montgomery wrote the stories.
I’m not certain of the illustrator, but I believe it’s either Russell H. Tandy or Bill Gillies, both of whom worked extensively for Grosset & Dunlap illustrating books in the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Dana Girls series, among others.
Contrast these G&D Thrushwood Books editions with the staid designs of the US and Canadian first editions.
Three years later in 1939, Montgomery published Anne of Ingleside, the eighth novel in the series, and sixth chronologically, and Grosset & Dunlap produced its own reprint edition to match its earlier ones.
Oddly, Grosset & Dunlap never issued matching reprint editions of the final two books in the series, 1919’s Rainbow Valley and 1921’s Rilla of Ingleside.
However, in 1940, it issued a matching edition of Chronicles of Avonlea, the first volume of short stories set in Avonlea, originally published in 1912.
And thirteen years later in 1953, it added the second volume of short stories, 1920’s Further Chronicles of Avonlea. The cover art for that one is truly stunning, but it’s clearly untethered to reality in its fashion sense and in the cultural aesthetic of a small village on Prince Edward Island.
Grosset & Dunlap seems to have made quite an effort to update Anne Shirley’s appeal to modern readers of 70 years ago, and the disconnect between the cover art and the contents of the books makes these my favorite editions.