academic in A Right to Die. In all this time, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin miraculously remained the same age, but Whipple never noticed or mentioned this oddity. Civil rights As noted earlier, Rex Stout had already had Nero Wolfe make civil rights a central issue in his 1938 Wolfe novel Too Many Cooks, although in that case his client was a not a black man, and so while many books were being written in that time period about the civil rights of Black Americans, few mainstream authors were writing a civil-rights sequel to a novel from 1938. Reviews and commentary Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime — Archie bestirs himself in Louisville and Evansville on the trail of a murderer whose identity is suggested to Nero by the abnormal frequency of a certain diphthong. How timely all this shown by the fact that Wolfe's client is a black whose son is about to marry a white girl, and by the nature of Wolfe's light reading: Science, the Glorious Entertainment. Publication history 1964, New York: The Viking Press, October 22, 1964, hardcover In his limited-edition pamphlet, Collecting Mystery Fiction #10, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe Part II, Otto Penzler describes the first edition of A Right to Die: "Blue boards, blue cloth spine; front cover printed with dark blue; spine printed with black; rear cover blank. Issued in a blue, red, black, and white dust wrapper." In April 2006, Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine estimated that the first edition of A Right to Die had a value of between $150 and $300. The estimate is for a copy in very good to fine condition in a like dustjacket. 1964, Toronto: Macmillan, 1964, hardcover 1965, New York: Viking (Mystery Guild), January 1965, hardcover The far less valuable Viking book club edition may be distinguished from the first edition in three ways: The dust jacket has "Book Club Edition" printed on the inside front flap, and the price is absent (first editions may be price clipped if they were given as gifts). Book club editions are sometimes thinner and always taller (usually a quarter of an inch) than first editions. Book club editions are bound in cardboard, and first editions are bound in cloth (or have at least a cloth spine). 1965, London: Collins Crime Club, April 12, 1965, hardcover 1965, New York: Bantam #F-3061, December 1965, paperback 1966,