# Is "Father Goose: His Book" by L. Frank Baum (illus. W. W. Denslow) a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Father Goose: His Book by L. Frank Baum (illus. W. W. Denslow) (George M. Hill, 1899) is identified by: The documented first-printing point is a negative one: the copyright page of the first printing carries no edition or printing statement of any kind, and later printings add one. US-only origination, and the census claim is correct: Geo.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- The documented first-printing point is a negative one: the copyright page of the first printing carries no edition or printing statement of any kind, and later printings add one
- Physically, the book is a quarto in original pictorial gray paper-covered boards, unpaginated (54 leaves including the front blank), with colour illustrations throughout by W. W. Denslow and the verso of the final leaf crediting Ralph Fletcher Seymour for the hand-lettered text (an economy measure — the verse was hand-lettered rather than typeset)
- Because reprints followed within weeks — publication was 25 September 1899 in an initial run of about 5,700 copies, a second printing of 10,000 followed on 16 October, and roughly 75,700 copies had been run off by Christmas 1899 — the copyright page is doing nearly all the identification work, and copies should be checked against Bienvenue & Schmidt (or Greene & Hanff) rather than on imprint and date alone
- CORRECTION TO THE CENSUS CLAIM: the claimed "first-state points on the laid-paper text" could not be corroborated in any source consulted; no paper, laid/wove, or watermark point is documented for this title, and that claim has been dropped rather than published
- Publisher imprint reads George M. Hill
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | L. Frank Baum (illus. W. W. Denslow) |
| Publisher | George M. Hill |
| Year | 1899 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Children's / illustrated |
| Key point | The documented first-printing point is a negative one: the copyright page of the first printing carries no edition or printing statement of… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
The documented first-printing point is a negative one: the copyright page of the first printing carries no edition or printing statement of any kind, and later printings add one. Physically, the book is a quarto in original pictorial gray paper-covered boards, unpaginated (54 leaves including the front blank), with colour illustrations throughout by W. W. Denslow and the verso of the final leaf crediting Ralph Fletcher Seymour for the hand-lettered text (an economy measure — the verse was hand-lettered rather than typeset). Because reprints followed within weeks — publication was 25 September 1899 in an initial run of about 5,700 copies, a second printing of 10,000 followed on 16 October, and roughly 75,700 copies had been run off by Christmas 1899 — the copyright page is doing nearly all the identification work, and copies should be checked against Bienvenue & Schmidt (or Greene & Hanff) rather than on imprint and date alone. CORRECTION TO THE CENSUS CLAIM: the claimed "first-state points on the laid-paper text" could not be corroborated in any source consulted; no paper, laid/wove, or watermark point is documented for this title, and that claim has been dropped rather than published.

## Is this the true first?
US-only origination, and the census claim is correct: Geo. M. Hill Co., Chicago (and New York), 1899 is the true first. No UK or other-language edition precedes it, and no British trade edition of 1899 is documented in the sources consulted. This is the Baum–Denslow collaboration that immediately precedes and financed the look of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the same publisher, so it is collected as an Oz-adjacent first in its own right, not as a "first thus" of anything earlier.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue is documented for a title of this date. The governing reprint tell is the copyright-page edition statement — any printed edition or printing wording there rules out the first printing. The practical trap is not a book club but the sheer speed of the reprint sequence: six printings of between 10,000 and 30,000 copies each followed within three months of publication, all dated 1899 with the same imprint, so a correct-looking 1899 Hill copy is far more likely to be a later 1899 printing than the first.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Father Goose: His Book* by L. Frank Baum (illus. W. W. Denslow) a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/father-goose-his-book
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.