First edition, first printing, presentation copy inscribed in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, "For Helen and Hanson Baldwin from Anne Lindbergh - March 1955", and additionally signed on the title page. Hanson Weightman Baldwin (1903-1991) was military editor of the New York Times, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the early days of World War II. Anne Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea was a hugely popular "reflection on a woman's life" through a vacation's meditative beach combing alone on Florida's Captiva Island, during which time her marriage to the aviator Charles Lindbergh was on the rocks. "As the sea tosses up its gifts - shells rare and perfect - so the mind, left to its ponderings, brings up its own treasures of the deep. And the shells become symbols here for the various aspects of life she is contemplating... Lindbergh shares with the reader her awareness of the many frustrating elements we face today: the restlessness, the unending pressures and demands, the denial of leisure and silence, the treat to inner peace and integration, the uneasy balance of the opposites, man and woman. With radiant lucidity she makes visible again the values of the inner life, without which there is no true fulfilment" (Jacket front flap). Contemporary presentation copies of the first printing of this classic, which has sold over 3,000,000 copies, been translated into 45 languages, and is still very much in print, are scarce indeed.
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