Horse Under Water

Census claim on precedence confirmed, the jacket detail corrected as above. Jonathan Cape (London), published 21 October 1963, is the true first; there was no American edition until G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York) issued it in 1968, stated as the first American edition. One genuine complication must be recorded rather than smoothed over: roughly 500 copies were sent out ahead of publication to reviewers and trade buyers with plain black endpapers, deliberately, so as not to pre-empt the crossword competition, and at least some of those copies physically preceded the first impression. Plain black endpapers therefore cover two quite different things — pre-publication review and trade copies, and ordinary later impressions — and black-endpapered copies carry no "second impression" statement on the copyright page to tell them apart. The state collected as the true first is the crossword-endpaper copy.