No Orchids for Miss Blandish

The census claim stands: Jarrolds, London, 1939 is the true first, and no other edition competes for precedence. The first American edition is Howell, Soskin, New York, 1942 — publisher's turquoise/greenish-blue cloth, spine lettered in red, 254 pp. — and is collected as such, but it is a textual trap rather than a rival first: the Bear Alley Chase bibliography and the Orwell Society both record the October 1942 Jarrolds text (and the Howell, Soskin 1942 issue keyed to it) as the revised, expurgated version derived from the Chase/Robert Nesbitt stage adaptation, not the 1939 novel. A collector wanting the text George Orwell wrote about in 1944 must have the Jarrolds 1939.