Waste Heritage Baird, Irene

Baird, Irene. Waste Heritage. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, as St. Martin s House. 1939. First Canadian edition. [8], 329 pp. Price-clipped dust jacket protected in Brodart. Green cloth. With the bookplate of the Macmillans of Canada on the front pastedown, and another previous owner s bookplate on the free front endpaper. Some notations on free front endpaper. Dust jacket and book very good, with marginal sunning along top edge, The sewn sheets for the book were sent by Macmillan of Toronto to Random House in New York. Publication was meant to be simultaneous between Toronto and New York, but due to the request for revisions by the Canadian government for passages that might adversely affect wartime recruitment, the New York edition was published a few weeks earlier. The dustjackets for both editions were supplied by Random House, and other than the censorship changes, the two editions are the same except for their title pages which have different publisher imprints. An example of the censorship: in the first edition, on pages 6-7, Harry speaking to the novel s protagonist, Matt, "Seems like the country s waitin for Hitler to give you boys a job so you can all be heroes overnight." "Sure, an get blown to hell an damnation in the morning! That s one job I don t take." In the Canadian edition, the exchange is as follows: "Seems like the country s waitin to get a real scrap on its hands so all you guys can be heroes overnight." "Yeah? An where do we wake up the next mornin ? I asked guys that an they just look at me." Despite the book being the most important Canadian novel to come out of the 1930s, sales were poor because the outbreak of World War II instantly rendered the Great Depression as yesterday s news. Thus the book is scarce, especially in jacket.