Gone With The Wind

Item Details

New York, Macmillan, June 1936

First Edition Second Printing, Very Good

First edition, second printing of Margaret Mitchell's great American novel "Gone with the Wind".

The title page reads "Present from  Dana  Plummer to F.L. Smith"  with date  "March   14, 1937"  (I believe).  And  beneath the inscription in  darker ink Margaret Mitchell signature with 1936.  

The book has Gray cloth with dark blue titling, there is slight damage to the spine cover and some yellowing onn outside of pages. The pages remain attached  and  binding is still firm.

Background: Macmillan had initially planned for May 1936 as the publication month for Gone With Wind. So the first batch of books that rolled off the press in preparation for publication had copyright pages that stated "Published May, 1936". But as the publication date approached, the novel attracted the attention of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which wanted to make the book available to its subscribers in June rather than May. So Macmillan pushed the publication date to June, and changed the publication date in all subsequent printings to June. But rather than scrap their May copyright books, they released them in June along with their June copyright books. Consequently, the May books are the earliest and true first printings, and the June books are the second printing.

Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" in the first line of the third stanza of "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae"  a [oem by Ernest Dowson (1894) , chose the line as the title of her novel Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This book is also one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels. Other Time 100 Novels include The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Grapes of Wrath.

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