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First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Ayn Rand from Isabel Paterson / 'Because he was himself, because I was myself.' M. de M." This copy connects two prominent figures in American libertarianism, and dates from the earliest years of their association. Paterson closes with a famous quotation from Michel de Montaigne's essay on friendship. A leading Canadian-American journalist and esteemed literary critic, Paterson (1886-1961) is credited as one of the "three furies" of the American libertarian movement alongside Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane (William F. Buckley Jr. quoted by Burns, p. 746). Her biographer Stephen Cox describes her as "the earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today". Rand, a disciple and one-time protegé of Paterson, believed that Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), was "a document that could literally save the world - if enough people knew of it and read it. [It] does for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity - and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism. It takes a book to save or destroy the world" (letter of 28 November 1943, in Berliner). The God of the Machine was published in the same year as Rand's The Fountainhead. Paterson and Rand were introduced by a mutual acquaintance in 1940, and quickly became friends and political allies. "The contrasting approaches to ideas evident in First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Ayn Rand from Isabel Paterson / 'Because he was himself, because I was myself.' M. de M." This copy connects two prominent figures in American libertarianism, and dates from the earliest years of their association. Paterson closes with a famous quotation from Michel de Montaigne's essay on friendship. A leading Canadian-American journalist and esteemed literary critic, Paterson (1886-1961) is credited as one of the "three furies" of the American libertarian movement alongside Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane (William F. Buckley Jr. quoted by Burns, p. 746). Her biographer Stephen Cox describes her as "the earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today". Rand, a disciple and one-time protegé of Paterson, believed that Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), was "a document that could literally save the world - if enough people knew of it and read it. [It] does for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity - and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism. It takes a book to save or destroy the world" (letter of 28 November 1943, in Berliner). The God of the Machine was published in the same year as Rand's The Fountainhead. Paterson and Rand were introduced by a mutual acquaintance in 1940, and quickly became friends and political allies. "The contrasting approaches to ideas evident in their letters seem also to have characterized their conversations - Rand organized and logical; Paterson spontaneous and sometimes rambling. Rand later said of Paterson '... At her best, she was enormously rational, with a very wide kind of abstract mind, could talk fascinatingly, make the best philosophical identifications and abstract connections. And generally was a marvelous mind... At her worst, she would turn into a mystic'" (Berliner). Their relationship deteriorated in 1948, after Paterson insulted several of Rand's friends. If It Prove Fair Weather is Paterson's final novel. "Paterson contrives the kind of situation that allows her to study the basic moral and psychological dilemmas that she regards as typical of intimate relationships. Of her chief male character, Paterson remarked that 'there was no way for him to behave well. He had only a choice of behaving badly in different ways'" (Cox, introduction to the 2009 edition of The God of the Machine, pp. xxi-xxii). Provenance: private collection of Jay T. Snider; Bonhams, 28 June 2005 (The Library of Ayn Rand). READ MORE Octavo. Original dark orange cloth, spine and front cover lettered and blocked in gilt and black. With pictorial dust jacket. Lean to spine, ends gently bruised, faint discoloration along fore edges of a few preliminary leaves, contents clean; jacket bright and unclipped (priced $2.50), chipped and creased at extremities, several tears neatly stabilized with tape on verso. A near-fine copy in a very good dust jacket. Michael S. Berliner, ed., Letters of Ayn Rand, 1997, available online; Jennifer Burns, "The Three 'Furies' of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand", Journal of American History, Vol. 102, Issue 3, Dec. 2015, pp. 746-74; Stephen Cox

This book, written by Margaret E. Bell, presents a compendium of poems intertwining human emotions with the tranquility of nature. A must-read for poetry enthusiasts.