Land of the Good Shadows: The Life Story of Anauta, an Eskimo Woman [*SIGNED* by the book's subject]

New York: The John Day Company. Very Good+. (c.1940). 3rd impression. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy, light wear to extremities, a teensy bit of fraying at the base of the spine]. (B&W photographs, endpaper maps) INSCRIBED and SIGNED on the half-title page: "with / Best Wishes to / John, E J Waddell / From / [Eskimo characters] / Anauta"; with additional inscription in the same hand: "with the compliments of your friend / Will J. McEwen," with a Marion IN address (in a very different hand) added. [See second scanned image with this listing.] Per Wikipedia, the subject of this book "was an Arctic author, memoirist and lecturer [who] is best known for [this book], which may be the first book-length autobiography of an Inuk." Born on Baffin Island circa 1890, she moved around a bit before settling in Indianapolis around 1920; with the help of a newspaper cartoonist, she began to hit the lecture circuit in 1929, where she was billed as "the only Eskimo woman on the American platform." Of this book, a collaboration with children's author Washburne, Wikipedia writes that "the story was certainly embellished for a white audience, with Blackmore claiming to have been adopted and rasied by an Inuk woman." The book contains a page presenting the Baffin Island Eskimo alphabet, and a 3-page glossary of Eskimo words. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that signed copies of this book are highly uncommon. (Please excuse the wavy lines in the scanned image of the book's cover; this is a function of my scanner, and are NOT present on the book itself.) Signed by Biographee .