2 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) first editions are documented on this shelf, from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) to Dutchman and The Slave (1964) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) 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 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note — 1961 · Totem Press / Corinth Books, New YorkTotem Press in association with Corinth Books, New York, 1961 (recorded as June 1961); a chapbook in stapled wrappers, octavo, 47 pages, in white wrappers with cover illustration by Basil King. Jones's first book, collecting poems of 1957-60, dedicated to his then-wife Hettie Jones. The copyright page carries NO first-edition statement — cataloguers are explicit that the first edition is 'not explicated as such…. US only. Totem Press / Corinth Books, New York, 1961 is the true first and the sole first edition, issued in wrappers only — no clothbound issue of the first is documented, and no British or other-language edition preceded or accompanied it. Totem Press was founded and run by Jones himself; in late 1960 it allied with Corinth Books, the small press of Eli and Ted Wilentz of the Eighth Street Bookshop, which is…. No book-club edition documented — this is a wrappered small-press chapbook. The title went through many printings under the same imprint and in the same format, with a fifth printing recorded in 1969 and a sixth in 1970, and these later printings are the standing trap: they carry the same 1961 copyright and the same Basil King cover, and are separated from the first chiefly by the bold-capitals last-page….
Dutchman and The Slave — 1964 · William Morrow, New YorkFirst edition, first printing: William Morrow & Company, New York, 1964. The point is the copyright page, which lists no additional printings; there is no number line, and later printings are identified by the printing statement added there. Critically, the book was issued simultaneously in two formats in 1964 — a clothbound issue and a wrappers issue in Morrow's Apollo Editions (A-122) — so 'first edition' alone…. US true first — census claim confirmed. William Morrow, New York, 1964 precedes the first UK edition, Faber & Faber, London, 1965 ([vi], 88 pp., gilt-lettered red cloth), which is separately collected as the first English edition but is a reprint of the text. Both plays had been staged before publication — Dutchman opened in 1964 and took the Obie for Best American Play — so the Morrow volume is the first book…. No book-club issue is documented for the Morrow printing. The live trap is format rather than a club copy: the 1964 Apollo Editions paperback (A-122) is a genuine first printing in wrappers and is routinely and accurately listed as 'First Edition; First Printing' — it simply is not the clothbound issue, and buyers of a 'first' frequently receive it. Later Morrow and Apollo printings are identified by the printing….

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