WINESBURG, OHIO A GROUP OF TALES OF OHIO SMALL TOWN LIFE de Anderson, Sherwood:

New York: Huebsch, 1919.. Yellow cloth, paper spine label. Endsheet map. Light hand soiling to cloth, label tanned, early bookplate on verso of free endsheet, small personal shelf label on rear pastedown, else about very good, without the dust jacket. First edition, with the top stain, the early reading at 86:5 ('lay'), the unbroken title border rule, and the battered type at 251:3. Signed in full by Anderson on the free endsheet in a very early hand, and signed again and bearing his lengthy 1924 inscription on the first blank: "If I have had any individual American thing to say in prose surely it began to say itself in Winesburg. The book was written on certain winter evenings in the loft of an old garage on Cass Street - Chicago. A very happy time for me. Sherwood Anderson Jan 14 - 1924." The first line of the inscription was eradicated at an early point and is now very faint, but may have read "My dear Martin...." An appealing copy of what by any measure is one of the fundamental books of our national literature of the past century, and a work exerting an influence matched by few other prose works on contemporary and succeeding generations of writers. Inscribed copies are no longer common. SMITH A-243. JOHNSON HIGH SPOT, p.14.