# Is "The Hounds of Tindalos" by Frank Belknap Long a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long (Arkham House, Sauk City, 1946) is identified by: Arkham House, Sauk City, 1946; 2,602 copies printed. The true-first claim is CONFIRMED: Arkham House (Sauk City, 1946) is the first edition, an American original.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Arkham House, Sauk City, 1946
- 2,602 copies printed
- No printing statement is present — Arkham House firsts of this period carry none, so identification rests on the title leaf, date, and physical points
- Octavo, 316 pp., bound in black cloth with gilt decoration and lettering to the spine
- Twenty-one stories — Long's first collection of weird fiction, drawn largely from Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds and other pulps published between 1924 and 1944
- Dust jacket art by Hannes Bok; a first-issue jacket is unclipped with the price present at the flap
- Publisher imprint reads Arkham House, Sauk City

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Frank Belknap Long |
| Publisher | Arkham House, Sauk City |
| Year | 1946 |
| True first | American edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Arkham House, Sauk City, 1946 |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Arkham House, Sauk City, 1946; 2,602 copies printed. No printing statement is present — Arkham House firsts of this period carry none, so identification rests on the title leaf, date, and physical points. Octavo, 316 pp., bound in black cloth with gilt decoration and lettering to the spine. Twenty-one stories — Long's first collection of weird fiction, drawn largely from Weird Tales, Unknown Worlds and other pulps published between 1924 and 1944. Dust jacket art by Hannes Bok; a first-issue jacket is unclipped with the price present at the flap. No reprinting of the Arkham sheets is recorded for this title, so a copy with the Arkham House 1946 title leaf and the 316-page collation is the first.

## Is this the true first?
The true-first claim is CONFIRMED: Arkham House (Sauk City, 1946) is the first edition, an American original. The census precedence note is CORRECTED, however: the UK Museum Press edition (London, 1950, 352 pp., jacket art attributed — disputedly — to Mervyn Peake, with the attribution contested between a Peake commission and a commercial artist copying his 1943 'Life-in-Death') is the first British edition, and it is NOT documented as an abridgment. Sources conflict on its contents (one dealer describes sixteen stories; reprint-history accounts treat the Arkham and Museum Press texts as the complete ones), so the 'abridgment' label should not be relied on and is not asserted here. The genuinely documented abridgments are the Belmont paperbacks 'The Hounds of Tindalos' (1963) and 'The Dark Beasts' (1964), which between them omit three stories.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No contemporary book-club issue is documented. The reprint traps are the paperbacks: Belmont's two-volume split (1963/1964) omits three of the twenty-one stories, and later reissues have carried as few as nine to eleven of the original stories. Panther Books issued a complete two-volume British paperback as 'The Hounds of Tindalos' (1975) and 'The Black Druid' (1975). All carry their own imprints and are readily distinguished from the Arkham House hardcover.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Hounds of Tindalos* by Frank Belknap Long a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-hounds-of-tindalos
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.