Introduction:
A Note on the Order of the Books:
The Tintin books are listed here in the order in which they were originally written and published in French. That is very different from the order in which they became available in America and the order in which I first read them. Because my family collected Tintin books as Atlantic-Little, Brown originally published them in the States, I can give an idea of when they were published in America, although there is at least a little confusion with that. My (now falling apart) original copy of The Crab with the Golden Claws lists four titles on the back. 
Yet, one of those titles is King Ottokar’s Sceptre. My (now falling apart) copy of King Ottokar’s Sceptre is a “First American Edition” and lists eight titles, the same eight titles listed on the back of my (now falling apart) original copy of Cigars of the Pharoah, which is a “First American Edition” and is from 1975. In Tintin in America (“Third American Edition”) it lists 20 books on the back – all except Soviets, Congo, Blue Lotus and Alph-Art. Tintin in America was in fact, the twentieth published in the United States (it says so on the back of the book).
One of the oddities is that two of the books that were among the original four, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, were published during the decade as serials in Children’s Digest. I still have the cover for the January 1977 issue of Children’s Digest with The Secret of the Unicorn on the cover. Odd, that they would only at that point be publishing a story that was already available in book form. (more…)
