# Is "A Shropshire Lad" by A. E. Housman a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1896) is identified by: Housman paid for the printing himself; the first printing consisted of only 500 sets of sheets, of which about 250 were bound up first for the British issue under the Kegan Paul imprint dated 1896, a further 100 were bound later for the British market under the same imprint and date, and the remaining 150 sheets were given a cancel title leaf bearing John Lane's New York imprint dated 1897 for the American issue. The British issue, under the Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner imprint dated 1896, precedes the American issue; the 150 sheets shipped to New York received a cancel title leaf carrying John Lane's imprint and the date 1897, so surviving American-issue copies postdate the original British printing even though they share the same setting of type and sheets.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Housman paid for the printing himself; the first printing consisted of only 500 sets of sheets, of which about 250 were bound up first for the British issue under the Kegan Paul imprint dated 1896, a further 100 were bound later for the British market under the same imprint and date, and the remaining 150 sheets were given a cancel title leaf bearing John Lane's New York imprint dated 1897 for the American issue
- The British-issue binding is octavo (172 x 110mm) in pale-blue paper-covered boards with a white parchment spine and a cream paper spine label printed in red, title page printed in red and black, edges untrimmed, and issued without a dust jacket; the American issue was bound differently, in a half-vellum spine over gray paper-covered boards
- Carter and Sparrow's Housman bibliography (revised by William White) records four variant states of the British-issue spine label, loosely correlated with which of the two British binding batches a copy belongs to, though assigning an individual copy to a batch by label state alone is treated as conjectural
- Publisher imprint reads Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co.
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | A. E. Housman |
| Publisher | Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. |
| Year | 1896 |
| True first | British edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | Housman paid for the printing himself; the first printing consisted of only 500 sets of sheets, of which about 250 were bound up first for… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
Housman paid for the printing himself; the first printing consisted of only 500 sets of sheets, of which about 250 were bound up first for the British issue under the Kegan Paul imprint dated 1896, a further 100 were bound later for the British market under the same imprint and date, and the remaining 150 sheets were given a cancel title leaf bearing John Lane's New York imprint dated 1897 for the American issue. The British-issue binding is octavo (172 x 110mm) in pale-blue paper-covered boards with a white parchment spine and a cream paper spine label printed in red, title page printed in red and black, edges untrimmed, and issued without a dust jacket; the American issue was bound differently, in a half-vellum spine over gray paper-covered boards. Carter and Sparrow's Housman bibliography (revised by William White) records four variant states of the British-issue spine label, loosely correlated with which of the two British binding batches a copy belongs to, though assigning an individual copy to a batch by label state alone is treated as conjectural.

## Is this the true first?
The British issue, under the Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner imprint dated 1896, precedes the American issue; the 150 sheets shipped to New York received a cancel title leaf carrying John Lane's imprint and the date 1897, so surviving American-issue copies postdate the original British printing even though they share the same setting of type and sheets.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Sales were slow at first but grew markedly during the Boer War and had reached about 13,500 copies a year by 1911, well before the book's best-known association with British soldiers of the First World War; Housman moved to the publisher Grant Richards within a few years, and Richards issued numerous further printings and small pocket editions in different cloth bindings, some with dust jackets. Only the 1896 sheets in the original pale-blue paper boards with a white parchment spine, as described above, constitute the true first edition.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *A Shropshire Lad* by A. E. Housman a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/a-shropshire-lad
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.