Bram Stoker First Editions

• Dracula — 1897 · Archibald Constable and CompanyFirst edition, Archibald Constable and Company (Westminster/London), 1897; first impression of 3,000 copies in the publisher's yellow cloth lettered in red on the spine and front board; published at six shillings; collation approximately [viii] + 390 pp. The decisive first-issue point is at the very back of the book: the final integral leaf (the last leaf of the last gathering, signature 2C4) is BLANK and carries…. The London/Westminster Constable yellow-cloth edition of 1897 is the true first; the first American edition (Doubleday & McClure Co., New York, 1899) is a separate, later first and does not precede it. Within the 1897 first printing there are two binding states: State A (priority), with no publisher's advertisement catalogue bound in at the rear; and State B, with an UNDATED Constable catalogue that lists no book…. There is no book-club edition of the 1897 first. The traps are later Constable printings and cheap/colonial reissues: the second to fourth printings add the 'Shoulder of Shasta' advertisement on the terminal leaf, and later reissues appear in different cloth (the colonial issue carries its own title-page imprint). A rear publisher's catalogue is not proof of a first issue — the earliest copies have none, and any….
• The Jewel of Seven Stars — 1903 · William Heinemann, LondonLondon, William Heinemann, 1903: 337 pages, original red cloth, front and spine panels stamped in blind and gold, with dealer descriptions consistently noting gilt star decoration on the front cover. The decisive point is TEXTUAL rather than typographic — the first edition contains Chapter XVI, 'Powers — Old and New,' and Stoker's original grim ending, in which the resurrection experiment fails and Margaret and…. UK first and true first: William Heinemann, London, 1903, 337 pp. — census claim confirmed, and it carries the original ending. US first: Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1904, in dark blue cloth stamped on spine and front panel in light green and silver (silver stars, green-lettered title), with 'Published February, 1904' on the copyright page; sources give the pagination variously as 310 or 311 pp. The…. The chief later-issue trap is the abridged reissue: William Rider & Son, London, 1912, 307 pp., which deletes Chapter XVI and substitutes the happy ending. It is a 'first thus' at best, and it is the text most modern reprints — and the Project Gutenberg file — carry; it is unclear whether Stoker himself made the changes. The excised chapter was later printed separately as 'The Bridal of Death' in a 1990….
• The Lair of the White Worm — 1911 · William Rider & Son, LondonConfirmed. William Rider and Son, Limited, London, 1911: octavo (approx. 19 x 13 cm), original bright red cloth, the front panel stamped in blind and the spine panel stamped in gold and blind, with six inserted colour plates by Pamela Colman Smith (designer of the Rider–Waite tarot), the frontispiece with tissue guard; pp. viii, 324, followed by advertisement leaves and a publisher's catalogue. The decisive point…. UK Rider 1911 is the true first and the only first — there was no simultaneous or near-simultaneous American edition. The novel was not published in the United States until 1966, when Paperback Library (New York) issued it in its Gothic series retitled The Garden of Evil, a mass-market paperback with cover art by Victor Kalin. That is the first American appearance, but it is a paperback reprint of a 55-year-old…. No contemporary book-club edition documented. The governing trap is the 1925 W. Foulsham & Co. (London) issue, in purple cloth stamped gilt, pp. 190 plus advertisements: it is an abridged and partly rewritten text, cut from 40 chapters to 28 — the final eleven chapters compressed into five, producing the abrupt ending critics complain of — by an unidentified hand, and it drops the plates. Because the Foulsham….
• Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories — 1914 · George Routledge & Sons, LondonConfirmed. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., London, 1914 (Broadway House, 68–74 Carter Lane, E.C.): octavo, original decorated red to scarlet cloth, the front panel with author, title and decoration stamped in blind and the spine panel stamped in gold and blind; pp. [1–8], 1–200. Collates nine stories and opens with Florence Bram Stoker's preface, in which she describes the title story as an episode excised from…. Posthumous UK Routledge 1914 is the true first, published two years after Stoker's death at Florence Stoker's instigation. The first American edition did not follow until 1937, from Hillman-Curl, Inc., New York, under the shortened title Dracula's Guest (dropping "and Other Weird Stories"), in publisher's decorated light green cloth stamped in black on front and spine panels, top edge stained, fore-edge…. No contemporary book-club edition documented. The reprint field is dense: multiple stated impressions appeared within 1914 (second, third, and later — a ninth impression is recorded), all dated from the same first-edition setting and outwardly near-identical in size and binding, and these are the copies most often mis-offered as firsts precisely because the title-page year is unchanged. Later Routledge printings,….

More Fantasy & Horror shelves: Brandon Sanderson, Carl Laymon (Richard Laymon), Clive Barker, C.S. Lewis, Dan Simmons, Dean Koontz.

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