Titus Alone

Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1959 is the true first — census claim CONFIRMED. The first American edition is Weybright & Talley, New York, 1967 (blackish-blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, 284 pages plus two terminal blank leaves, greyish-violet endpapers, title-page vignette of a chained crown with crow and ten line drawings in the text), and is collected as the first US. The census note on the text also holds and is the point that matters: the 1959 first prints a text heavily cut by its editor — whole chapters omitted and references to modern technology such as helicopters and cars removed. Langdon Jones re-edited the novel from Peake's manuscripts in 1970, working from material supplied by Peake's widow Maeve Gilmore, and every edition from 1970 onward carries the Jones text as standard. So the 1959 issue is the collectible object but the corrupt text, and the 1970 restored text is a 'first thus,' not a first edition.