Troubles

Jonathan Cape (London), 1970, is the true first and the first volume of the Empire Trilogy; it took the Faber Memorial Prize and, retrospectively, the 2010 'Lost Man Booker Prize' for 1970. Alfred A. Knopf issued the first American edition in New York, with a jacket designed and illustrated by Wendell Minor. The American date is genuinely muddled and the census claim of 'US Knopf 1971' is not established: dealers list Knopf copies as both 1970 and 1971, and one describes a copy whose title page states 1970 while the preliminaries state 1971 and the jacket flap is coded 8/71. The Cape precedence is not in doubt either way.