Good-bye to All That

The real trap is not a book club but the 1957 revision: Graves substantially rewrote the book for Cassell (London) and Doubleday (New York) in 1957, and that rewritten text — the one in print ever since — is a different book from the 1929 original, a "first thus" at best and routinely offered as though it were the first. Within 1929 the volume of printing is the hazard: 20,000 copies sold in the first week and 30,000 by December, and Cape ran multiple impressions in November and December 1929, all in the same salmon cloth and all resembling the first. Because fewer than 100 copies escaped in the first state while the opening week alone sold 20,000, the expurgation was carried out during the original print run — meaning a first-impression copy is not necessarily a first-state copy, and only the text at p. 290 and pp. 341-343 settles it.