Swallows and Amazons

No 1930 book-club edition is documented — with 2,000 copies printed there was no club issue to make. The reprint traps are Cape's own: the 1931 illustrated edition and the many later impressions from the same setting, separated by the impression statement on the title-page verso and by the presence of Webb's (1931 onward) or Ransome's (fourteenth impression, November 1938, onward) illustrations. Any in-text illustration at all rules out the 1930 first. The jacket is a further trap: the 1930 wrapper is Spurrier's and the 1931 wrapper is Webb's, so Webb-jacketed copies offered as 1930 firsts are wrong on their face. Facsimile dust jackets for this title are commercially produced and sold openly, and are readily mistaken for original wrappers once shelved.