Limited first edition (no. 125 of 504 copies numbered and signed by the author), quarter vellum with cloth boards, top edge gilt, fore and bottom edges uncut, Jonathan Cape, 1930.

Book condition: the vellum has darkened and there is some slight mottling and fading to the green boards, but a very good copy.

The publisher's blurb for the first trade edition is short, and allows Williamson's writing to speak for itself: 'Mr. Williamson has divided his book alternating chapter for chapter into the dual aspects of village life, The Spirit of the Village, the personalities and incidents that make up village life; and Air and Light of the Field and Sea, descriptive passages, we quote one at random:

"One frosty night I listened to the lap and gurgle of the sea racing at the gravel ridges, a faint clamour, like staghounds laid on to the line of a deer, sounded far up in the sky. The clamour changed to a trumpeting, they were coming down; the water shook in a net of stars, the night was filled with the rush of wings. A baying from stretched necks; a sudden uprising of frail cries from bank to bank, going far down into the distance, the harsh krark of an uneasy heron. The wild geese had flwon down from the north."'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Village Book.)