# Is "Emphyrio" by Jack Vance a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Emphyrio by Jack Vance (Doubleday & Company, 1969) is identified by: First edition: Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969; octavo, 261 pp., cloth, issued in a pictorial jacket with the price present at the flap. US precedes and is the true first: Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1969 — the key Vance hardcover of the period, with no prior magazine serialization to complicate precedence.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition: Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969; octavo, 261 pp., cloth, issued in a pictorial jacket with the price present at the flap
- The controlling point is the Doubleday statement: "First Edition" printed on the copyright page beneath the copyright notice — Doubleday's documented practice from the 1920s through 2000 was to state "First Edition" (or "First Printing") on the copyright page and to carry no statement at all on later printings, so a Doubleday-imprint copy lacking that line is a later printing
- Doubleday additionally printed a gutter code — a letter for the year of manufacture plus a number for the week — at the foot of the last page of text from mid-1958 to mid-1987, and K is the 1969 year letter (corroborated by dated 1969 Doubleday examples such as the "28K" code)
- The gutter code dates the sheets only: because Doubleday applied it to trade and club printings alike, a K code does not by itself prove a trade first
- No first-state text error is documented in the sources consulted; ex-library copies with copyright-page and textblock stamps are common
- Publisher imprint reads Doubleday & Company
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Jack Vance |
| Publisher | Doubleday & Company |
| Year | 1969 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition: Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969; octavo, 261 pp., cloth, issued in a pictorial jacket with the price… |
| Book-club edition exists? | Yes |

## Points of issue
First edition: Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969; octavo, 261 pp., cloth, issued in a pictorial jacket with the price present at the flap. The controlling point is the Doubleday statement: "First Edition" printed on the copyright page beneath the copyright notice — Doubleday's documented practice from the 1920s through 2000 was to state "First Edition" (or "First Printing") on the copyright page and to carry no statement at all on later printings, so a Doubleday-imprint copy lacking that line is a later printing. Doubleday additionally printed a gutter code — a letter for the year of manufacture plus a number for the week — at the foot of the last page of text from mid-1958 to mid-1987, and K is the 1969 year letter (corroborated by dated 1969 Doubleday examples such as the "28K" code). The gutter code dates the sheets only: because Doubleday applied it to trade and club printings alike, a K code does not by itself prove a trade first. No first-state text error is documented in the sources consulted; ex-library copies with copyright-page and textblock stamps are common.

## Is this the true first?
US precedes and is the true first: Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1969 — the key Vance hardcover of the period, with no prior magazine serialization to complicate precedence. Britain came late and in wrappers: the first UK edition is the Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton) paperback of 1980, so there is no competing British hardcover first and no UK-vs-US contest to adjudicate. Later Dell paperback, Underwood-Miller, and Millennium/Gollancz issues are reprints or "first thus."

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Run the Doubleday club tells: "Book Club Edition" printed at the foot of the front jacket flap, no price on the jacket, a five-digit code on the jacket's back panel, a small blind stamp (square, dot, circle, triangle or maple leaf) debossed into the lower rear board near the spine, thinner bulk on cheaper paper, and boards sometimes covered in paper rather than cloth. The trap that catches buyers is that Doubleday book-club copies can carry over the trade copyright page — including the "First Edition" line — so the statement alone never settles it; the jacket flap and rear board decide. No separate Science Fiction Book Club printing of Emphyrio surfaced in the sources consulted, but any copy showing the tells above is not the trade first regardless.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Emphyrio* by Jack Vance a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/emphyrio
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.