Watership Down science fiction writer and conservative social commentator writing in the "National Review", declared that the novel was "pleasant enough, but it has about the same intellectual firepower as Dumbo." He pilloried it further: ""Watership Down" is an adventure story, no more than that: rather a swashbuckling crude one to boot. There are virtuous rabbits and bad rabbits: if that’s allegory, "Bonanza" is an allegory." John Rowe Townsend notes that the book quickly achieved such a high popularity despite the fact that it "came out at a high price and in an unattractive jacket from a publisher who had hardly been
Watership Down obituary of Collings, to accept "a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but," she continued, "it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive." Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered." Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave "Watership Down" its title. There was a second edition in 1973. Macmillan USA, then a media giant, published the first U.S. edition in 1974 and a Dutch edition was also published that year by Het Spectrum.