I notice that there is a lizard logo on the earliest Monster Manuals.

I do not recall ever seeing anything but a wizard logo on the books that appeared in Oregon book shops back in the day.

I have one of the first Players Handbooks sold in Oregon.  It is not a first print....as I recall.

Were there delays in getting the books all around the country?

Did some print runs never reach...for instance...the Pacific Northwest...or Scotland...or whatever?

So, for instance, if one lived in Brisbane, Australia, or Aukland, New Zealand, did the local shops ever have a first print on hand?

Were some items published and distributed only in certain parts of the country?  For instance, were the woodgrains ever even sold far away from the Midwest?

Did some items only appear by mail order...and thus would not have ever appeared on a hobby store shelf?  For example, the Holmes edition of the Dungeons and Dragons boxed set, containing In Search of the Unknown, is the first boxed set I think Oregonians ever saw.  The first time I saw an earlier box it was on Invincible Overlord's shelf.

Does anyone out there know about shipping patterns and marketing decisions that drove the release and shipping of such items?

Mark  

What about in regards to Canada, Frank? Was Toronto or Montreal (or perhaps another major Candian city) considered decent markets at the time, or unknown?

Rhone Ethenkhar wrote:What about in regards to Canada, Frank? Was Toronto or Montreal (or perhaps another major Candian city) considered decent markets at the time, or unknown?

Definitely Calgary was a destination for the 1st printing of the Monster Manual.  A friend of mine has one and he bought in new right off the shelves of the local War games shop here.  He also has 1st players handbook and DM guide.

MShipley88 wrote:I also wonder if the first foreign language editions contained a few bizarre and/or unfortunate translation errors.

Praps.

I worked closely with Andre Moullin, TSR's VP International, in planning and executing the translations of my boxed sets and in selecting adventures to be done with 'em. My first wife Penny (Petticord then, and now Mrs. Ralph 'Skip' Williams), personally checked a lot of the German translations (due to her background in chemistry and multilingual fluency), and caught a lot of glitches.

We hired translators for the French and Italian, and later for the others. Bruce Heard checked the French ones, but I don't think anybody at TSR was proficient in Italian.

In retrospect we should have had a translator for the British ones, too...