Dragonflight

US paperback original (Ballantine, July 1968) is the true first; the hardcovers all follow it. The first UK hardcover is Rapp & Whiting (London), jacket art by Lawrence Edwards — and here the sources conflict: library cataloguing dates it 1969 (Open Library, and the British National Bibliography note carried on the 1970 Corgi reprint reads "Originally published, New York, Ballantine... London, Rapp & Whiting, 1969"), while several dealers catalogue it as 1968. That discrepancy is unresolved, and the precedence between the Rapp & Whiting and the US Walker and Company (New York, 1969) hardcover therefore cannot be settled from the sources consulted — L. W. Currey catalogues the Walker as "first hardcover edition" without qualification. The Walker copyright page states "Published in the United States of America in 1969." Because the true first is a paperback, both hardcovers are separately collected; a dealer's unqualified "first hardcover" claim should be read against this conflict.