The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents

Pre-dates book clubs entirely. The reprint hazards are the 1797 Dublin two-volume printing and the many nineteenth-century collected-Radcliffe and 'Novelist's Library' resettings, plus modern scholarly reprints (Oxford World's Classics, Penguin, Valancourt) that reproduce the 1797 text but are 'first thus' at best. Any copy dated after 1797, or collating as fewer than three volumes, is not the London first.