2 E. Nesbit first editions are documented on this shelf, from Five Children and It (1902) to The Railway Children (1906) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that E. Nesbit 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 E. Nesbit copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

Five Children and It — 1902 · T. Fisher UnwinT. Fisher Unwin, London, 1902. 8vo, xv, 301pp, illustrated by H. R. Millar. Publisher's original red cloth with gilt titling and pictorial gilt blocking to the front board and spine; edges red as reported by dealer cataloguing. The text first appeared not in this volume but serially in The Strand Magazine, in monthly instalments from April to December 1902, under the general title 'The Psammead, or the Gifts',…. UK T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1902 is the true first in book form, and the census is correct. The first American edition is Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1905, likewise with Millar's illustrations — published three years after the London edition, so no simultaneity or precedence question arises and the American edition is a distinct, separately collected first American rather than a rival true first. First volume…. Later Unwin printings retain the setting, and the title was reissued continuously through the twentieth century. Principal trap is 'first thus': the 1948 Looking Glass Library edition illustrated by J. S. Goodall is offered by dealers as a 'the printed pricet Edition' — it is a mid-century reissue with new illustrations, not the 1902 first. Modern Penguin, Alma and similar reprints are current trade editions.
The Railway Children — 1906 · Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. Ltd.Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. Ltd., London, 1906. 8vo (233 x 144mm). Collates half-title, frontispiece, pictorial title, and 19 further plates — twenty plates including the frontispiece — all after C. E. Brock, with 10 pages of publisher's advertisements at the end. Original pictorial maroon cloth blocked in gilt; top edge gilt, the others uncut. These points are corroborated independently by a Sotheby's…. Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., London, 1906 is conventionally catalogued as the first edition, by auction houses and specialist dealers alike, and the census is right about the publisher and year. But the census's flat claim that 'US Macmillan followed' is NOT established and should not be relied on. The first American edition — The Macmillan Company, New York, 1906, also with Brock's drawings, 309pp, in pictorial…. The chief reprint risk is not book-club issues — the title predates the book-club era — but same-date publisher reprints: later Wells Gardner printings retain the 1906 title-page date, as do early Macmillan New York reprints, and one is offered online explicitly as a '1906 Macmillan early reprint'. Collate for the full complement of twenty Brock plates and for the 10pp of publisher's advertisements at the end,….

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