2 John Milton first editions are documented on this shelf, from Paradise Lost (1667) to Paradise Regain'd ... to which is added Samson Agonistes (1671) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that John Milton 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.

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Paradise Lost — 1667 · Samuel Simmons, LondonLondon, 1667, quarto, 'A Poem Written in Ten Books' — the ten-book arrangement is itself the primary point, since the 1674 second edition recast the poem into the twelve books familiar today; any copy in twelve books is not the 1667 first. Samuel Simmons was the publisher, but his name is ABSENT from the earliest title pages, which name only the booksellers Peter Parker, Robert Boulter and Matthias Walker; his…. No UK-vs-US question exists: London 1667 is the true first and the only first. There is no original-language issue — the poem is English. The 1674 second edition (twelve books, with the added commendatory verses) and the 1688 subscription folio are separate editions, not states of the first, and the 1688 folio in particular is often offered as an early 'first' — it is not. No book-club or reprint-society tells apply to the 17th-century printings. The one recurring trap is the frontispiece portrait: the first edition was NEVER issued with an author portrait, so a portrait found in a 1667 copy is a later insertion, usually the William Dolle engraving taken from the 1674 or 1678 editions. Realistically, donor copies are 18th-century or later editions, Victorian illustrated reprints….
Paradise Regain'd ... to which is added Samson Agonistes — 1671 · Printed by J[ohn] M[acock] for John Starkey, LondonLondon, 1671, octavo; the imprint reads "Printed by J. M. for John Starkey at the Mitre in Fleetstreet, near Temple Bar" — J. M. is the printer John Macock, Starkey the bookseller-publisher. Wing M2152. The first issue carries the misprint "loah" for "loth" on page 67 (signature F2), line 2; the reading was corrected to "loth" in the later state, so "loah" is the decisive earliest-state point. A complete copy has…. The 1671 London octavo is the only edition published in Milton's lifetime and is the true first of both poems — Samson Agonistes has no separate prior edition, appearing here for the first time. The census claim is confirmed. There is no earlier or competing continental or original-language edition; Milton wrote in English and the book was published in London. It is habitually collected alongside the 1667…. No book-club question arises for a 1671 book. The governing later-edition tell is the Omissa: in the 1680 second edition the ten omitted lines are printed in their correct place within the text of Samson Agonistes rather than appended on a separate leaf at the end, so a copy with those lines set in place is not the 1671 first. Copies of the 1671 lacking the licence leaf, the Omissa leaf or the errata leaf are….

More Nonfiction & Memoir shelves: John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Jon Krakauer, Jonathan Swift, Joseph J. Ellis, Karl Marx.

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