Algernon Blackwood First Editions

• The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories — 1906 · Eveleigh Nash, LondonOctavo, collating pp. [i-ii] iii [iv] [1] 2-316, bound in original pictorial green cloth with the front panel stamped in black, red and white and the spine panel stamped in gold; the bottom edge is untrimmed. The key ancillary point is a Nash publisher's catalogue dated 'Autumn 1906' bound in at the rear (recorded at 31 or 32 pages by different cataloguers). Eveleigh Nash carried no edition or printing statement…. The census claim is confirmed: the London Eveleigh Nash edition of 1906 is the true first and the only period edition. This was Blackwood's first book, collecting ten stories; its reception (including Hilaire Belloc's notice in The Morning Post, 3 January 1907) prompted the second collection, The Listener (1907), which carried 'The Willows.' No contemporary American edition is recorded in the ABAA/ILAB dealer…. No book-club issue is documented for the 1906 Nash edition. The reliable reprint tells are negative ones: absence of the Autumn 1906 rear catalogue combined with non-pictorial or rebound cloth points away from the first issue, and any copy carrying a later Nash date or a modern publisher's imprint (including the many twentieth-century and print-on-demand reissues of this public-domain text) is not the first.….
• The Listener and Other Stories — 1907 · Eveleigh Nash, LondonFirst edition: London, Eveleigh Nash, 1907 — Blackwood's second book and second collection. Octavo, collating pp. [1-9] 10-350 [351-352: blank], with a final blank leaf. Bound in original black cloth, the front panel stamped in red and in blind, the spine panel stamped in gold, and the publisher's device stamped in blind on the rear panel. Nash used no edition or printing statement and there is no number line, so…. The census claim is confirmed: the UK Eveleigh Nash edition of 1907 is the true first, and the collected point of the book is that it carries the first appearance of 'The Willows.' There was no competing American issue at the time — the first American edition did not follow until Vaughan & Gomme, New York, 1914, seven years later, and is collected only as the first US, not as a first edition. No original-language…. No contemporary book-club issue is documented for this title. The recurring traps are the 1914 Vaughan & Gomme New York edition (a genuine first American but not the first edition) and later Nash reprints and cheap editions struck from the same setting; modern trade and print-on-demand reissues are 'first thus' only and carry none of the 1907 binding or collation points.
• John Silence — Physician Extraordinary — 1908 · Eveleigh Nash, LondonFirst edition: London, Eveleigh Nash, 1908. Octavo (approx. 190 x 122 mm), [4]ff plus 390 pp., containing the five John Silence cases. Bound in publisher's red (variously described by dealers as red, maroon or burgundy) cloth, titled in gilt on the spine and the front board, with a gilt swastika device stamped at the lower front corner — a period good-luck ornament, and the single most useful binding tell for the…. The precedence claim is confirmed: the UK Eveleigh Nash edition of 1908 is the true first. The first American edition followed from John W. Luce & Company, Boston, in 1909; it is separately collected as the first US but is subsequent to the London printing and is not the first edition. One caution on the census note: the 'promoted on London buses' detail could not be corroborated in any bibliographic or dealer…. No contemporary book-club issue is documented. The common reprint tells are the Luce Boston 1909 first American (Boston imprint on the title page, different collation), later Nash reissues from the same setting, and the widely circulated 1920s–1930s reprints; any copy lacking the gilt swastika device at the lower front corner of a red-cloth board should be treated as a later binding or reprint until the imprint….
• The Lost Valley and Other Stories — 1910 · Eveleigh Nash, LondonThe title page reads in full 'The Lost Valley: and other stories / by Algernon Blackwood; with eight illustrations by W. Graham Robertson' — the illustration statement is the single most useful identification point, and a complete first must contain all eight Robertson plates, the first of them a tissue-guarded frontispiece. Collation is 328 pages, octavo (c. 20 cm), in original dark green cloth with the spine…. The census claim is confirmed: London, Eveleigh Nash, 1910 is the true first, and it carries the first appearance in print of 'The Wendigo,' the volume's most reprinted story. The collection gathers ten tales: 'The Lost Valley,' 'The Wendigo,' 'Old Clothes,' 'Perspective,' 'The Terror of the Twins,' 'The Man from the Gods,' 'The Man Who Played Upon the Leaf,' 'The Price of Wiggins's Orgy,' 'Carlton's Drive,' and…. No book-club issue is documented. The dominant trap is the modern reprint of 'The Wendigo' as a standalone title, and the Midnight House omnibus 'The Lost Valley / The Wolves of God' (2005) — both are 'first thus' at best and share no sheets with the 1910 Nash volume. Any copy without the Robertson illustration statement on the title page is not the Nash first edition.

More Fantasy & Horror shelves: Ambrose Bierce, Ann Radcliffe, Anna Katharine Green, Arthur Machen, Bentley Little, Bram Stoker.

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