2 David Hume first editions are documented on this shelf, from A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) (1748) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that David Hume 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 David Hume copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

A Treatise of Human Nature — 1739 · John Noon, LondonPublished anonymously - Hume's name appears nowhere in the first edition, so any title page naming him as author is a later edition. Volumes I (Of the Understanding) and II (Of the Passions) were printed for John Noon and issued together in late January 1739; volume III (Of Morals) was printed for Thomas Longman and followed in late 1740, so a complete first edition necessarily carries two different publishers'…. London is the true first; Hume wrote in English and there is no competing foreign or original-language edition, so the whole precedence question is the Noon/Longman sequence itself. The census claim is confirmed: vols. I-II John Noon 1739, vol. III Thomas Longman 1740. Because the third volume appeared roughly eighteen months later from a different house, the two Noon volumes are very often found alone - a…. No book-club or reprint-society issue exists for the 1739-40 sheets. Later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printings, and all modern scholarly editions (Selby-Bigge, Selby-Bigge/Nidditch, the Clarendon Hume), are separate editions rather than states of the first; the quickest tell is authorship on the title page, since the first edition is anonymous.
Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) — 1748 · Printed for A. Millar, LondonOne volume, duodecimo (measured by dealers at c. 163–166 × 95–98 mm), collating pp. iv, 256, [4], the final leaves carrying Millar's advertisements; woodcut device on the title-page. The imprint reads 'London: Printed for A. Millar, 1748'. Hume's name is not on the title-page: it reads 'Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. By the Author of the Essays Moral and Political.' — that by-the-author-of…. The census claim is correct, and this is one of the standard title-change traps in philosophy collecting. The 1748 Millar Philosophical Essays is the first edition in any form of the work now universally known as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding; the Enquiry title dates only from the 1758 Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, in which Hume renamed and reordered his philosophical writings for the last…. No book clubs; the traps are Hume's own reissues and the title change. A second edition of the Philosophical Essays appeared in 1750, was reprinted in 1751, and appeared again in 1753 as vol. II of the four-volume Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. The 1758 Essays and Treatises is the first appearance under the Enquiry title, and the posthumous 1777 text is the one most modern editions follow. Any copy….

More Nonfiction & Memoir shelves: David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Douglas Southall Freeman, E. O. Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, Erik Larson.

← All authors · All genres · part of the First-Edition Identification resource.