The Poky Little Puppy

The governing trap is that the 1942 copyright date is carried forward on every reprint for eighty-plus years, so the date proves nothing — Biblio's Little Golden Books guide makes this its headline warning. The 1947 redesign is the clearest later-issue tell: the book was reduced to the standard 8 x 6.5 in. trim with a shorter collation (28 pages, later 24), the dust jacket was dropped, and the blue spine gave way to an applied gold-foil spine over hard paper covers. Any gold-foil-spine copy, any jacketless copy in the smaller trim, and any 24-page collation is a later issue, not the 1942 first.