2 A. E. Housman first editions are documented on this shelf, from A Shropshire Lad (1896) to Last Poems (1922) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that A. E. Housman title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a A. E. Housman copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

A Shropshire Lad — 1896 · Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co.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. 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….
Last Poems — 1922 · Grant Richards, LondonPublished 19 October 1922. The first-impression point is a punctuation error: the first two lines of poem XXVI on page 52 carry no punctuation marks. Grant Richards offered to insert an errata slip and Housman refused — 'The blunder will probably enhance the value of the printed pricet edition in the eyes of bibliophiles, an idiotic class' — so the error stands uncorrected in the first impression and was…. UK precedes US. Grant Richards (London), 19 October 1922, is the true first. Henry Holt and Company (New York) published the first American edition later the same year — dealer copies record it as printed in November 1922 — and it is a separate edition rather than an issue of the London sheets; both are dated 1922, so the imprint separates them. Last Poems is the companion volume to A Shropshire Lad (1896) and…. No book-club edition. The reprint risk is the several Grant Richards impressions that followed the first within weeks and are also dated 1922 — these have the page 52 punctuation corrected, which is the reliable discriminator. The 1922 Henry Holt (New York) printing, and all later Holt, trade, and Housman Society printings, are separate editions rather than states of the first.

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