The Story of Little Black Sambo

UK Grant Richards, London, October 1899 is the true first, and the census is correct on that. The first American edition is Frederick A. Stokes, New York, 1900, which followed and is separately collected. CORRECTION to the census: the Stokes 1900 edition did NOT use different art. Stokes bought the rights from Grant Richards and its edition reproduces Bannerman's own illustrations, differing in its cover binding rather than its artwork. The versions with genuinely different art are the later unauthorised American editions — illustrated by John R. Neill (1908), Frank Dobias (Macmillan, 1927), and Ethel Hays (Saalfield, 1942) among at least twenty-seven English-language versions issued between 1905 and 1953, which relocated the setting and imposed racial caricature absent from Bannerman's drawings. That distinction matters bibliographically and historically and should be stated accurately.