The Dunwich Horror and Others

Arkham House (Sauk City), 1963, is the true first edition of this collection; no UK or other edition precedes it. It should be understood as a "first thus" rather than a first appearance of any text: the stories had already been printed in the pulps and in Arkham's earlier Lovecraft omnibuses — The Outsider and Others (1939) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) hold the first Arkham book appearances. What is genuinely first here is this selection and August Derleth's introduction to it. The census note calling it "first of the definitive core-canon selection" is fair as far as it goes, but the definitive text is precisely what the 1963 printing does not contain.