The Sword in the Stone

UK first: Collins (London, 1938) — the true first and the text collectors want. The first US edition, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York, 1939), is a substantively different book, not a reprint: Putnam required revisions and White rewrote accordingly, most conspicuously the Madam Mim chapter (softened for a young audience) and the Robin Hood sequence, and he replaced the Anthropophagi episode with Queen Morgan le Fay and her fairies. The Putnam is bound in blue cloth stamped in gilt, with illustrated endpapers by Robert Lawson, a red top-stain, and 310 pp. Both the Collins 1938 and the Putnam 1939 are collected — the second as the first American edition and as a distinct text. A third text exists and is the first-thus trap: the version of The Sword in the Stone inside The Once and Future King (Collins, 1958) is revised again — Madam Mim dropped, the ant and wild-goose episodes added — and is never the first edition of this title.