Smyth Sewn
Custom Designed Laid Paper
100% recycled binder boards
Decorative printed cover paper
FSC-certified text paper
Threaded stitching and glue, as needed
Acid-free sustainable forest paper
About the Design & a Bit of History
Original Art: Anne of Green Gables handwritten draft: Era: early 1900s: Region: Prince Edward Island, Canada
As soon as it was published in 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, the first of eight stories about Anne Shirley, found its readership and made its author enormously famous. So it may be surprising to learn that, after multiple rejections by publishers, Montgomery (1874–1942) had at one point shelved the manuscript and this now-iconic piece was at real risk of not making it beyond the author’s writing desk. Fortunately, all those rejections were not enough to deter someone with a determined temperament such as hers, and eventually Montgomery found her publisher. And now, over one hundred years later, the first page of the novel’s manuscript has found its place in our Paperblanks collection.
L.M. Montgomery lost her parents when she was only twenty-one months old. This event, and her experience of growing up under the care of her grandparents on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, become a part of the life story of her most well-known character, Anne Shirley. Despite the loneliness of Montgomery’s childhood years, through imagination and sensitivity to the natural world, the future literary star came to love the island. This love gave birth to compassionate and gentle portrayals of rural landscapes and life in Canada’s Maritimes. For readers, the idyllic descriptions of rustic Canada and wholesome, earnest characters common to Montgomery’s stories were a welcome contrast to the sights of industrialization and urbanization picking up pace in the West at the time.
Although Montgomery wrote many novels, short stories and poems, to most she is known as the author of novels about Anne Shirley of Green Gables. Today, there are many tourist attractions on Prince Edward Island that commemorate the literary legacy of the good-hearted and high-spirited orphan girl with ginger hair. The manuscript page on the cover of this Paperblanks edition comes from the permanent collection belonging to the Performing Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, P.E.I., a part of the geography featured in the stories about Anne. On the back cover you’ll find an image representative of a typical P.E.I. scene. For the cover’s colour scheme we drew on the same inspiration that once gave creative impetus to Montgomery – the vistas of blue skies stretching over the island’s farmlands.
