Dicey's Song

New York: Atheneum, 1982. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/very near Fine. 8vo. [10], 3-196 pp. Brown cloth with a copper tree embossed on the front board and copper lettering on the spine. The correct price of $10.95 on the front flap of the dust jacket. With an illustrated title page. The winner of the 1983 Newbery Award. Our jacket has a Newbery Medal sticker on it, however, this does not make it a later dust jacket. Newbery stickers are produced and sold by the American Library Association. Anyone, from a bookseller, a collector, or a librarian, can purchase and then paste a Newbery sticker onto a book's dust jacket. When it comes to books and their jackets, issues and states are determined based on the decisions of publishers and printers as they relate to the production and design of the book and its jacket (for further discussion of this, please see Bowers and Gaskell's treatises on bibliography). Newbery stickers are products of the American Library Association, and have nothing to do with the publisher or the printer, or the planned design of a book. This first edition copy in its first edition jacket was likely leftover stock in a bookstore, and the bookseller used a Newbery sticker as a marketing tool to try to get the book to sell. Whether or not it worked, remains unknown. This story is the sequel to Homecoming, following the story of Dicey and her three younger siblings and their new life with their grandmother. The Tillerman cycle challenges social conventions and societal norms as it follows four children who are abandoned by a single mother, and must navigate their way to a safe home.