Private Lives

The census claim holds, on sequence: the UK edition is the true first — William Heinemann, London, 1930, published within a week of the London opening — while the American edition (Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, New York, 1930) was published for a Broadway production that did not open at the Times Square Theatre until 27 January 1931. Both are collected; dealers describe the Doubleday, Doran as the first American edition, and it too appeared in a priced jacket. Stated honestly: no source consulted asserts the UK/US precedence explicitly — it rests on the publication sequence above — so the American edition should always be catalogued as 'first American edition' and never as 'first edition', and the precedence should be presented as sequence-based rather than as a bibliographer's ruling.