The Time It Never Rained

US-only true first: Doubleday & Company, Garden City, 1973. No contemporaneous UK edition traced in the sources consulted. The census claim of "a small genre-imprint printing" is REFUTED: this was not issued under Doubleday's Double D Western imprint -- the Library of Congress record carries no series statement and no dealer description consulted cites that imprint. It was published as a mainstream Doubleday novel. "First thus" traps: the Texas Christian University Press edition of 1984 (the reissue through which the novel is now best known), and the Forge/Tor reprints of 1999 and 2008 -- none is the first.