Anne of Green Gables (1908) was an immediate best seller when it was published by the L.C. Page Company of Boston. Eleven-year-old, red-haired, imaginative, talkative orphan, Anne Shirley, is adopted by a quiet, elderly brother and sister on a farm on Prince Edward Island in the late 1870's though they had sent for a boy. Anne bursts into the staid life of the community and takes the reader through many comic and touching episodes as she goes to school and matures. Her rivalry with Gilbert Blythe suggests a romance to come.
     Notice how the book covers have changed over time, showing an adult Anne in the first and early editions and then child Anne's as a perhaps misguided publishing market tried to separate a book about a child and teen from adult literature. Notice how adult are the advertisements used for the 1919 silent film of Anne.