From The Library of Cecil B. DeMille is this vintage original 6.5 x 9.25 in. hardback book with the original dustjacket from the classic love poem, EVOLUTION: A FANTASY, by LANGDON SMITH. Subtitled: When You Were A Tadpole And I Was A Fish. Published by John W. Luce and Company, Boston, MCMIX (1909). First Edition, First Printing in Book form, with the date 1909 on both the title page and the copyright page and no indication of additional printings (various stanzas and parts were previously published, as they were being written, in newspapers for which he worked as a journalist). The 1909 First Book Printing is scarce, especially so in its dustjacket. The work was reprinted many times, in a rather large printing in 1915, which is the copy most commonly found, and in many other later printings. Some of the later printings simply state "copyright 1909" on the copyright page, but you can tell the true FIRST PRINTING by the illustration on the front cover, which is substantially different from later printings.

There is also a lovely illustration on the INTRODUCTION page (often referred to bibliographically as a frontispiece to this first edition). Lovely illustrated framing and head pieces throughout. Condition: FINE book, a bit of wear to the spine ends, overall a sharp, tight, bright and clean copy; in a FAUR dust jacket that is clipped at its corners (perhaps issued that way?), the front cover has separated from the spine with chipping along the top edge and light wear along the bottom edge, nonetheless, this fragile paper dust jacket remains solid with a bright front cover illustration. This particular example may be somewhat unique in that after it was printed, not all of the pages were cut along the outer edges, so when you turn various pages, the subsequent two pages cannot easily be read (see accompanying photo for an example). 

This example came from the Library of Cecil B. DeMille and includes his bookplate affixed to the inside front cover. 

Langdon Smith (4 January 1858 – 8 April 1908) was an American journalist and author. His most well-known work is the poem "Evolution," which begins with the line, "When you were a tadpole and I was a fish." The line later became the title of an essay about this "one-poem poet" written by Martin Gardner. The poem became very popular even before his death and has been reprinted many times since.

In his biographical sketch of Smith, Lewis Allen Brown describes it as follows:

"… it is as the author of Evolution that he is best remembered. Skilled as a war correspondent, himself a veteran Indian fighter, a technical writer of sports, possessed of a mentality too great to be handicapped through lack of university training, he thought for himself upon life and death, of the past and future, and in Evolution voiced his beliefs." Brown described how Evolution was composed:

"The first few stanzas of Evolution were written in 1895 and published in the New York Herald where he was then employed. Four years later, when a member of the New York Journal staff, he wrote several more. These he laid aside for a while and then, from time to time, added a stanza until it was completed. Whether the editorial department failed to appreciate the poem, or the foreman of the composing room needed something with which to fill out a page is not known, but Evolution first appeared in its entirety in the center of a page of want advertisements in the New York Journal."

"A work of such merit, however, could not be lost. Mr. Smith received thousands of congratulatory letters from all parts of the world, accompanied by requests for copies of the poem which were exceedingly difficult to secure until reprinted in April, 1906, in The Scrap Book, edited by Mr. Frank A. Munsey."

Gardner claims to have located the precise issue of The New York Herald in which Evolution was first published: that of September 22, 1895. He also notes that Brown's information was taken from the Who's Who In America 1906-1907 article and an obituary published in The New York American on April 9, 1908, page 6, and that Brown does not add any new information to these sources.

According to a statement in The New York Times Book Review of July 23, 1910 it was "printed in full and illustrated in The Scrap Book of June 1909." Tributes to him on his death invariably emphasize the poem. According to a notice in the Ocala (Florida) Evening Star of April 17, 1908:

"Langdon Smith, the war correspondent and writer, died on Wednesday, at his home in Brooklyn, New York. No New York newspaper man was better known than Smith, who could describe, equally well, a battle or a baseball game, says the New York Post. But the thing that he wrote which will live the longest -- because it is worth while—is his poem "Evolution," which has been reprinted all over the country."