The Languages of Pao

US precedes and is the true first: Avalon Books (New York), 1958. Britain trailed by sixteen years and arrived only in wrappers — Mayflower (Granada) paperback, 21 March 1974, 157 pp. — so there is no competing British hardcover first. Two first-thus traps bracket the Avalon, in opposite directions. Backward: a shorter version ran in Satellite Science Fiction (December 1957), which precedes the book but is a periodical, not an edition of the novel. Forward: the full restored text was not printed until Underwood/Miller (San Francisco and Columbia, PA), 1979 — 500 copies, of which 389 were unnumbered and 111 numbered and signed by Vance and jacket artist Joe Pearson — catalogued by dealers as "first edition thus" and the first printing of the full restored text, not the first edition.