Is it a first edition?.help sought..

Hi,

Couple of questions..

A.I picked up "The Hundred and One Dalmations" at the local thrift
shop. I was wondering if it is the First American edition or a Book
Club Edition since I understand that the early Vikings are difficult
to identify..
1.The Top Inner Flap is unfortunately clipped.
2.The Copyright Page states:
Copyright @1956,1957 by Dodie Smith
Published in 1957 by The Viking Press, Inc.
625 Madison Avenue, New York 22
Published in Canada by the Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
3.There is no ISBN number on the Book or the DJ
4.The Book Cover seems to be blue/violet cloth
5.The DJ is a orange/pink in colour with a lot of dalmations and other
breeds.

B.I had another more generic question. While US publications have Book
Club Editions published by the same Publisher with obvious/not so
obvious differences, what about UK Publishers. Did they also have BCE.
How were they differenciated? I mean publishers like
Faber/Collins/Heinemann etc?

Thanks for all pointers and help..

Saj

saj wrote:

A.I picked up "The Hundred and One Dalmations" at the local
thrift shop. I was wondering if it is the First American edition or
a Book Club Edition since I understand that the early Vikings
are difficult to identify..

There are several BCE copies on ABE
(http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch). The sellers seem pretty clear
about them being BCEs, so it's probably fairly clearly marked. Is there a
blindstamp on the back of the hardback cloth cover?

1.The Top Inner Flap is unfortunately clipped.

It might have been price-clipped - or it may have been clipped in order to
conceal the fact that there never was a price (i.e., it is a book club
edition). But it's not that valuable a book anyway, and the chances that
anyone would do that are in direct proportion to the value of the true first
edition.

B.I had another more generic question. While US publications
have Book Club Editions published by the same Publisher with
obvious/not so obvious differences, what about UK Publishers.
Did they also have BCE. How were they differenciated? I mean
publishers like Faber/Collins/Heinemann etc?

Oh, yes, there are UK BCEs. Just enter [book club] and the names of any of
the publishers you mentioned in the publisher field at the ABE search prompt
to see a few examples (of course, there are probably many more, but the
sellers will not have put the full information in the publisher field when
making the entry).

There are exceptions, but most UK BCEs are pretty easy to spot. A lot of the
time you don't even have to take them down from the shelf, because it's
marked on the spine of the dust jacket. There are a few cases where the BCE
actually *is* the true first.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com