The Story of Doctor Dolittle

The census claim is confirmed and the reversal is real: although Lofting was English, the first edition is American — New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 25 October 1920 — and it precedes the first English edition, London: Jonathan Cape, by roughly two years. The Cape UK first is dated 1922 by dealer and library records (John Atkinson Books describes a 1922 Cape first edition, first printing of the inaugural Dolittle novel; the Internet Archive record and trade listings agree); Wikipedia gives 1924, which was not corroborated by any independent source and is treated here as an outlier, so 1922 is adopted. Both the Stokes 1920 and the Cape UK first are collected. The series trap the census flags is genuine: The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (Stokes, 1922) is the Newbery Medal winner and is far more widely held, but it is the second book of the series — The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920) is the series first and the scarcer book.