2 Ann Radcliffe first editions are documented on this shelf, from The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance (1794) to The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Ann Radcliffe title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Ann Radcliffe copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance — 1794 · G. G. and J. RobinsonPublished by G. G. and J. Robinson, London, on 8 May 1794, in four octavo volumes. A complete first-edition set carries all four half-titles, which are frequently missing from copies that have passed through a binder's hands, making their presence a key completeness point. Collation is Volume I: 428 pages; Volume II: 478 pages; Volume III: 463 pages; Volume IV: 428 pages. The novel's success helped establish the…. A rival Dublin edition, also dated 1794, was issued the same year under the era's separate Irish reprint trade, a common and legal practice at the time, but it does not have precedence over the authorized London Robinson edition. Nineteenth-century one-volume abridgments, such as George Routledge and Sons' cheap illustrated reprint of the 1880s, condense Radcliffe's four-volume text into a single volume and do not reproduce the original 1794 structure or half-titles.
The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents — 1797 · T. Cadell Jun. & W. Davies, LondonHand-press-era book: there is no edition statement, printing code or number line anywhere, so identification rests wholly on the imprint, the date and the collation. The true first's title page gives the title and 'A Romance. By Ann Radcliffe' with 'In three volumes,' the imprint 'Printed for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies (Successors to Mr. Cadell), in the Strand,' and the date 1797; Radcliffe is named on the…. London, T. Cadell Jun. & W. Davies, 1797, in three volumes, is the true first and the only edition of collecting consequence; the census claim is confirmed. The census's flagged trap is also confirmed and now has a concrete discriminator: the 1797 Dublin edition was printed for P. Wogan, T. Stewart, P. Byrne, J. Exshaw, W. Porter and six other Dublin booksellers, and is set in TWO volumes rather than three — an…. Pre-dates book clubs entirely. The reprint hazards are the 1797 Dublin two-volume printing and the many nineteenth-century collected-Radcliffe and 'Novelist's Library' resettings, plus modern scholarly reprints (Oxford World's Classics, Penguin, Valancourt) that reproduce the 1797 text but are 'first thus' at best. Any copy dated after 1797, or collating as fewer than three volumes, is not the London first.

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