# Is "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories" by Roger Zelazny a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories by Roger Zelazny (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971) is identified by: Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1971. US first, and the census call is correct: the Doubleday 1971 is the true first edition and no UK edition precedes it.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1971. "First Edition" is stated on the copyright page beneath the copyright notice — Doubleday house practice from 1927 to 2000 — with no number line
- Publisher's dark blue cloth, the spine lettered in silver; collates [x], 229 pp.; fifteen stories
- The jacket should be priced at the flap (price present, unclipped)
- One caution that trips people up: Doubleday applied a gutter code — a small alphanumeric code in the gutter margin of an inner signature — to BOTH trade and book-club printings from mid-1958 to mid-1987, so the presence of a gutter code on a 1971 Doubleday is normal and is not by itself a reprint or book-club tell
- Critically, the stated "First Edition" is also not sufficient on its own for this publisher; see the book-club note
- Publisher imprint reads Doubleday & Company, Inc.
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Roger Zelazny |
| Publisher | Doubleday & Company, Inc. |
| Year | 1971 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1971. "First Edition" is stated on the copyright page beneath the copyright notice… |
| Book-club edition exists? | Yes |

## Points of issue
Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1971. "First Edition" is stated on the copyright page beneath the copyright notice — Doubleday house practice from 1927 to 2000 — with no number line. Publisher's dark blue cloth, the spine lettered in silver; collates [x], 229 pp.; fifteen stories. The jacket should be priced at the flap (price present, unclipped). One caution that trips people up: Doubleday applied a gutter code — a small alphanumeric code in the gutter margin of an inner signature — to BOTH trade and book-club printings from mid-1958 to mid-1987, so the presence of a gutter code on a 1971 Doubleday is normal and is not by itself a reprint or book-club tell. Critically, the stated "First Edition" is also not sufficient on its own for this publisher; see the book-club note.

## Is this the true first?
US first, and the census call is correct: the Doubleday 1971 is the true first edition and no UK edition precedes it. The first UK edition was published by Faber and Faber, London — original yellow cloth, spine lettered in black, dust jacket illustrated by Dennis Leigh, ISBN 0571101054 — and is collected as the first British edition. Dealer listings date the Faber issue inconsistently to both 1971 and 1973 and that conflict was not resolved here; it does not disturb precedence, as the Doubleday is first on either dating, but the Faber year should not be stated flatly. The collection is the first book appearance only: the constituent stories appeared first in periodicals through the 1960s, the title novelette having taken the first Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1965.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
This is the central trap for Doubleday science fiction and the reason a stated "First Edition" settles nothing here: Science Fiction Book Club printings of Doubleday titles can RETAIN the "First Edition" statement on the copyright page. A book-club copy remains a book-club copy regardless of that statement. The tells are physical and on the jacket: a small blind-stamped square (or comparable blindstamp) at the lower right of the rear board; a jacket carrying no price at the flap but instead a five-digit book-club code, frequently black numerals in a white block; and smaller trim size, thinner paper, cheaper binding and a smaller, less legible typeface than the trade issue. Separately, Wikipedia records that two stories, "The Furies" and "The Graveyard Heart," were added in later printings for a total of seventeen — so a copy collating seventeen stories is not the 1971 first printing. That last point rests on a single pointer source and was not corroborated in a dealer bibliography or a Zelazny bibliography.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories* by Roger Zelazny a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-doors-of-his-face-the-lamps-of-his-mouth-and-other-stori
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.