3 Henry M. Stanley first editions are documented on this shelf, from How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa (1872) to In Darkest Africa (1890) across 3 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Henry M. Stanley 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.
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- How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa — 1872 · Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and SearleThe true first edition collates [7], viii-xxiii, [2], 2-736 pages plus 8 pages of publisher's catalogue dated October 1872, octavo, bound in brown pictorial cloth with beveled edges, titles, illustrations, and frames stamped in gilt and black on the front cover and spine. It carries a frontispiece portrait of Stanley reproduced as a mounted albumen photograph pasted inside a printed line border with a facsimile…. The London edition, published by Sampson Low soon after Stanley reached England in the summer of 1872, is treated as the first edition, preceding the New York edition from Scribner, Armstrong & Co.; the American edition substitutes a wood-engraved frontispiece of Stanley and his servant Kalulu for the mounted albumen photograph used in the London printing.
- Through the Dark Continent: or, The Sources of the Nile Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean — 1878 · Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & RivingtonThe true first edition, printed by William Clowes and Sons, collates in two octavo volumes: volume I xiv, [1], 522 pages, volume II ix, 566 pages, bound in original brown pictorial cloth, the front boards decorated in black with African landscape scenes and centered with a gilt map of Africa crossed by the Livingstone River and framed by Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika. It carries two frontispiece portraits, ten…. The London edition (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1878) is the true first, preceding the Harper & Brothers edition published in New York; the Harper edition is bound in pictorial green cloth rather than brown and carries a different plate count.
- In Darkest Africa — 1890 · Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and RivingtonThe true first (British) edition is a two-volume thick octavo set collating xv, 529; xi, 472, [2] pages, bound in original red pictorial cloth (the front board decorated with a jungle scene depicting Stanley and a native) with gilt-lettered spines, map endpapers, thirty-eight full-page plates, three folding maps (two in color), and a folding sketch profile. Sampson Low of London and Charles Scribner's Sons of New…. The London Sampson Low octavo edition of 1890 is the true first (trade) edition; Sampson Low and Scribner's each also issued a parallel signed 250-copy large-paper deluxe edition that same year, and the Scribner's American deluxe issue used sheets printed from the same setting as the English edition.
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