The Lair of the White Worm

No contemporary book-club edition documented. The governing trap is the 1925 W. Foulsham & Co. (London) issue, in purple cloth stamped gilt, pp. 190 plus advertisements: it is an abridged and partly rewritten text, cut from 40 chapters to 28 — the final eleven chapters compressed into five, producing the abrupt ending critics complain of — by an unidentified hand, and it drops the plates. Because the Foulsham abridgment remained the standard UK text until the full 1911 text was reprinted in 1986, most twentieth-century reprints descend from it rather than from the first; the 1966 Paperback Library Garden of Evil is a further retitled reprint in that line.