# Is "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock (Allison & Busby, 1969) is identified by: First edition: London, Allison & Busby, 1969; 144 pp., 8vo, issued in red cloth-covered boards with the backstrip lettered in gilt. UK precedes and is the true first: Allison & Busby (London), 1969, the first appearance in any form of the expanded novel.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition: London, Allison & Busby, 1969
- 144 pp., 8vo, issued in red cloth-covered boards with the backstrip lettered in gilt
- The copyright page carries the statement "First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby Limited..." with no number line and no later-printing line; that statement plus the Allison & Busby imprint and 1969 date is what establishes the issue
- The jacket is a photographic design credited to Gabi Nasemann, with the price present at the flap; price-clipping does not change the printing but removes one check on the issue
- There is no US hardcover of this book, so any American-imprint hardcover is by definition a later or foreign issue
- Publisher imprint reads Allison & Busby
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Michael Moorcock |
| Publisher | Allison & Busby |
| Year | 1969 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition: London, Allison & Busby, 1969 |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition: London, Allison & Busby, 1969; 144 pp., 8vo, issued in red cloth-covered boards with the backstrip lettered in gilt. The copyright page carries the statement "First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby Limited..." with no number line and no later-printing line; that statement plus the Allison & Busby imprint and 1969 date is what establishes the issue. The jacket is a photographic design credited to Gabi Nasemann, with the price present at the flap; price-clipping does not change the printing but removes one check on the issue. There is no US hardcover of this book, so any American-imprint hardcover is by definition a later or foreign issue.

## Is this the true first?
UK precedes and is the true first: Allison & Busby (London), 1969, the first appearance in any form of the expanded novel. The first American appearance is the Avon mass-market paperback (New York, May 1970, 160 pp., cover art by Bob Foster) — collected as the first US edition but not the true first, and there was no US hardcover. First-thus trap: the text began as the Nebula-winning novella in New Worlds (September 1966); that appearance precedes the book but is a periodical, not an edition of the novel, and its text is not the 1969 text. Mayflower (St Albans, 1970), Avon/Equinox (1976), Fontana, Grafton, Carroll & Graf, Millennium (1999), Overlook (2007) and Gollancz (2014) issues are all reprints or "first thus."

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club printing of the Allison & Busby edition is documented in the sources consulted. The routine confusions here are reprint paperbacks rather than club copies: Mayflower (1970) and Avon (1970) in the same year as one another, and the Avon/Equinox trade paperback of 1976, which is sometimes miscatalogued as a first because of its larger format. Any copy lacking the Allison & Busby imprint and the 1969 "First published in Great Britain" statement is not the first.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Behold the Man* by Michael Moorcock a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/behold-the-man
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.