2 Victor Hugo first editions are documented on this shelf, from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris) (1831) to Les Misérables (1862) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Victor Hugo 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 Victor Hugo copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris) — 1831 · Charles Gosselin, ParisFrench true first: Notre-Dame de Paris, Charles Gosselin, Libraire, Paris, 1831, 2 volumes 8vo (collating approx. [8], 404 and [4], 536 pp.), published 16 March 1831, with wood-engraved title vignettes after Tony Johannot; complete sets retain the volume half-titles with their verso advertisements, the fly-titles, and all nine interior half-titles. The single impression of 1,100 copies was split by the publisher…. Census claim confirmed on both halves. The French Gosselin edition of 1831 is the true first, and the title 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' has no counterpart in Hugo's French — it originates with the 1833 Bentley translation, so every English-language 'Hunchback' first descends from a retitling. The major 'first thus' trap runs the other way from the usual: the 1831 Gosselin first is textually INCOMPLETE. Gosselin…. No book-club structure applies to an 1831/1833 book; the practical analogues are marketing fictions and later reissues. Gosselin's own 'deuxieme/troisieme/quatrieme edition' title-pages are not later editions at all — they are the same 1831 printing given false statements — but they are equally not first issue. Bentley reissued the Shoberl translation repeatedly in Standard Novels through the 1830s and 1840s, and….
Les Misérables — 1862 · Hurst and BlackettThe first authorized British translation, its distribution rights purchased directly from Hugo and its translator, Sir Frederick Charles Lascelles Wraxall, recommended to him by the exiled French writer Alphonse Esquiros, was published by Hurst and Blackett, London, complete in October 1862. The first edition is bound in red quarter roan with a gilt-lettered and decorated spine over red pebble-grain cloth sides,…. Chronological and textual priority for the first complete English translation actually belongs to Charles E. Wilbour's American edition, published in New York by Carleton in five volumes issued monthly from June to October 1862 and widely credited by booksellers as the first edition in English; Hurst and Blackett's Wraxall translation, complete the same month, is properly the first authorized British edition, its…. All later unabridged English translations - by Isabel Hapgood, Norman Denny, Julie Rose, and others - are independent, more literal renderings unconnected to Wraxall's altered 1862 text; Wilbour's own 1862 Carleton translation is likewise independent of Wraxall, being a separate, contemporaneous American rendering rather than a later one, and a modern one-volume translation credited to a different translator is….

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