Swallows and Amazons

The census claim that Cape 1930 is the true first is confirmed, but its characterisation needs refining: calling it the "unillustrated first issue" implies a competing 1930 issue, and there is none — the 1930 book is simply the only Cape issue of the text without in-text illustrations, and the illustration history is where the traps lie. Cape's New Illustrated Edition of 28 September 1931 added 28 black-and-white illustrations and a new dust-wrapper by Clifford Webb; Ransome's own now-standard drawings did not appear until the fourteenth impression of November 1938. Both the Webb and the Ransome-illustrated issues are "first thus" and neither is the first edition. The first American edition is Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931 — a distinct book, 343 pp., with line illustrations and headpieces, two-colour illustrated map endpapers, a two-colour full-page map and a two-colour illustrated title page by Helene Carter, in publisher's green cloth lettered in black with yellow topstain and illustrated endpapers. Carter's illustrations, like Webb's, were later displaced by Ransome's own.