2 Robert Aickman first editions are documented on this shelf, from Dark Entries (1964) to Cold Hand in Mine (1975) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Robert Aickman 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 Robert Aickman copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

Dark Entries — 1964 · Collins, LondonAickman's first solo collection, gathering six stories: "The School Friend," "Ringing the Changes," "Choice of Weapons," "The Waiting Room," "The View," and "Bind Your Hair." Octavo, in the publisher's original tan cloth lettered in gilt on the spine — corroborated independently by two dealers — and issued in the original priced dust wrapper, with the price present at the front flap. The first impression carries…. The UK Collins issue of 1964 is the true first, and the census claim is correct: there was no contemporary US edition. American readers reached the contents only decades later, via Tartarus Press's The Collected Strange Stories (1999) and the Faber reissue of 2014 — both first thus, neither a first of Dark Entries. No book-club issue is documented. The recurring trap is the Fontana mass-market paperback (Collins' paperback imprint), which dealers catalogue under the Collins name and sometimes list as a "1964 First Edition" — it is a paperback reprint, not the first, and the cloth-and-jacket description above is what separates them. The Tartarus Press and Faber reprints are likewise not firsts.
Cold Hand in Mine — 1975 · Victor Gollancz Ltd, LondonFull title on the title page: Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories. Octavo, bound in violet/purple cloth with the spine lettered in gilt (independently described as "violet cloth" by one ABAA dealer and "purple cloth with gilt to spine" by a PBFA dealer — the same binding). L. W. Currey records no statement of printing on the copyright page, so the Gollancz first is identified negatively: the 1975 Gollancz…. UK first: Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1975 — the true first and the edition collected as such. It precedes the first American edition, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1977, which is collected in its own right chiefly for its Edward Gorey dust-jacket illustration; the Scribner's binding is described as black cloth with silver spine lettering under a white jacket with black type, but that description is…. A Book Club Edition of the Scribner's US printing exists and is offered by dealers, so the US edition must be screened before it is called a first. Period BCE tells apply: no printed price at the jacket flap, a blind stamp or small impressed mark on the rear board, and thinner, cheaper boards than the trade issue. No book-club printing of the Gollancz first is documented.

More Fantasy & Horror shelves: Robert Bloch, Robert Jordan, Robert R. McCammon, Robin Hobb, Samuel Butler, Shirley Jackson.

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