The Little Locksmith, Katharine Hathaway, 1943, Coward-McCann 

Believed to be 1st edition, but not sure. 

The Little Locksmith is a memoir by Katharine Butler Hathaway about the effects of spinal tuberculosis on her childhood and adult life. Originally published in 1943, it was reprinted by The Feminist Press in 2000.

The Little Locksmith, Katharine Butler Hathaway's luminous memoir of disability, faith, and transformation, is a critically acclaimed but largely forgotten literary classic brought back into print for the first time in thirty years. The Little Locksmith begins in 1895 when a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her being a "hunchback." 

Her mother says that she should be thankful that her parents are able to have her cared for by a famous surgeon; otherwise, she would grow up to be like the "little locksmith," who does jobs at their home; he has a "strange, awful peak in his back." Forced to endure "a horizontal life of night and day," Katharine remains immobile until age fifteen, only to find that she, too, has a hunched back and is "no larger than a ten-year-old child." 

The Little Locksmith charts Katharine's struggle to transcend physical limitations and embrace her life, her body and herself in the face of debilitating bouts of frustration and shame. 

Her spirit and courage prevail, and she succeeds in expanding her world far beyond the boundaries prescribed by her family and society: she attends Radcliffe College, forms deep friendships, begins to write, and in 1921, purchases a house of her own in Castine, Maine. 

There she creates her home, room by room, fashioning it as a space for guests, lovers, and artists. The Little Locksmith stands as a testimony to Katharine's aspirations and desires-for independence, for love, and for the pursuit of her art.

"We tend to forget nowadays that there is more than one variety of hero (and heroine). Katharine Butler Hathaway, who died last Christmas Eve, was the kind of heroine whose deeds are rarely chronicled. They were not spectacular and no medal would have been appropriate for her. All she did was to take a life which fate had cast in the mold of a frightful tragedy and redesign it into a quiet, modest work of art. The life was her own.

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From the Book:  

"The first thing I found is a sequence...first I looked and I began to see...then, inevitably I noticed that what I saw was amazing, beautiful. The beginning of the sequence, then, is, first you see, then you admire. " ...

"Next admiration leads to gratitude, next, gratitude leads to humility, for the person who receives much feels grateful and then humble, because he wonders how he can have deserved such an extravagant kindness. "

"Humility is naturally followed by a feeling of wonder and adoration toward the source of these miracles, the God who made them and put them there. 

When I thought of our incredible rudeness, taking all this for granted and then complaining and asking for more, I tried to think of some way to make amends and it dawned on me then to pray. 

It is the natural expression of those who begin and end each day in that most beautiful instinctive human attitude, the attitude of the sensitive, courteous guest of God, on their knees with the head bent down before an ever-present God toward whom their hearts open like drooping flowers or like radiant flowers. 

They know the whole sequence. They not only see, and admire, and take, and stop there. 

In recognition of what they have seen, admired, and received, they finish the sequence, they put themselves and their lives into God's hands to do as He will with them. "