Valdez Is Coming

True first: Robert Hale, London, 1969 (hardcover). First US: Fawcett/Gold Medal, Greenwich, October 1970 (paperback original, R2328) — a paperback original in the US, which is the point the census note was reaching for, but it is the first American edition, not the true first. Both are collected: the Hale as the true first, the Gold Medal as the first US and the form in which American readers met the book. Accounts of the Gold Medal printing tells conflict — one widely cited collector account offers both the printed cover price and the presence of stills from the 1971 Burt Lancaster film as first-printing evidence, but a 1970 first printing cannot carry stills from a 1971 film, so that account is unreliable on this point; rely on the R2328 number and the absence of any later-printing notice.