They will have been, though much more recently. Higgins republished most of the titles by his alternate personae under the Higgins name, so they'll be around. But I doubt there was any US counterpart to the early 60s issues. He was almost a complete unknown and the print runs appear to have been practically microscopic over here.
As far as I can work out there are only 5 known copies of the 1964 'Devil' in the UK. The one currently on ABE and our copy, one in the British Library, one in an Oxford library but not sure Bod/Uni, and one in Edinburgh I think it was. I'll assume Mr Patterson has a copy, so that would make 6. There are probably at least as many more in collections, but that's still only 12. Small print runs here seem to be on the order of 300 to 500 copies.
Taking 300 as a big enough risk on a relative newcomer, I can only imagine the wonderful book-destroying British public libraries system took care of the rest - rebound, laminated, rubber-stamped, stickered, sellotaped, shelved, moved, dropped, kicked, used as a coaster, chewed, annotated, scrawl-illustrated, shelved, lost, found, discarded, recycled.
Still, this copy here emerged from a fairly unlikely place - Clovelly, Devon: has been billed as the world's prettiest village.
I lived there from 1990 to 1999, and watched about 50% of the populations of Canada, USA, Australia and Europe make their hesitant way down the cobbled High Street. No more than 5% ever went back up that way, though, and the climb took decades off the life-expectancy of most of those. The sensible (and larger) ones took the Land Rover service which ferried people, from sea level back up the 500 feet or so of elevation, to the visitor centre and car park via a service road that is so steep in places it is almost unclimbable on foot. No seat belts in the back, just a bench seat on either side, so that when the vehicle reached the top there was usually a tangle of bodies at the very rear on each side. I used to ride up on the access step just outside where a towbar would be fitted. I've actually caught tourists of all sorts of nationalities, who hadn't given a thought to bracing themselves for a climb the reverse of the descent they just made, only at 20 to 30 mph in what was basically the payload bed of a pick-up truck with aluminium-framed canvas walls and roof, as they almost fell past me onto the road (or quite often a huge sledge that the vehicle was towing). I've been very lucky to hurl several back inside - lucky because I'm not a big chap and most of my 'catches' outweighed me significantly.
Ah, the good old days.
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A preoccupation with the next world is a clear indication of an inability to cope credibly with this one.
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