Come on, Give us a Smile

So not only am I a librarian, but it turns out I'm also a rare book collector (!). Check out what I found yesterday in this awesome used book store on Maryland's Eastern Shore: a copy from the second American printing of The Bell Jar. From the front jacket flap:

At last Sylvia Plath's only published novel is available in her own country, eight years after it was published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, enormously talented, successful—but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time...

I have never seen it in hardcover, let alone with this super/creepy cover. If you've read the book, you know that scene where Esther has to have her picture taken for the magazine and they make her pose with a rose and she totally freaks out? Well, the back cover of the copy I just got shows the photo of Sylvia Plath with a rose that appeared in Mademoiselle's August 1953 issue.