2 Lord Byron first editions are documented on this shelf, from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) to Don Juan (Cantos I and II) (1819) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Lord Byron 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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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — 1812 · John Murray, with William BlackwoodFirst edition, quarto, an edition of 500 copies that sold out within days of publication in March 1812, printed by Thomas Davison. Contains Cantos I and II with Byron's explanatory notes, fourteen additional shorter poems, and an appendix on Romaic (modern Greek) language and literature drawn from his recent travels. The title page carries a French epigraph from Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde; the quarto…. Murray issued a second, octavo edition only weeks later, on 17 April 1812, with six additional poems, and further editions followed within the same year and over the next several years as the poem's fame grew. Only the original 500-copy quarto of March 1812, containing just Cantos I-II, is the true first edition; format and content must both be checked, not merely the "Murray, 1812" imprint. Because Childe Harold went through numerous printings within 1812 alone and further editions after Cantos III and IV appeared (1816 and 1818), a first-edition copy must be the two-canto March 1812 quarto; octavo copies, or copies containing more than two cantos, are later states or the later four-canto collected editions.
Don Juan (Cantos I and II) — 1819 · Thomas Davison, printer, for John Murray; neither author's nor publisher's name printed in the bookFirst edition, published 15 July 1819 with neither Byron's nor Murray's name printed anywhere in the volume, a deliberate anonymity driven by the poem's scandalous content. Issued in a handsomely printed, more expensive issue alongside a smaller, cheaper issue of the same setting; contents comprise only Cantos I and II, with some 1,500 copies produced of the initial printing. Byron's dedicatory verses attacking…. Because Murray's name did not appear in the book, he had little legal recourse against the unauthorized reprints that quickly followed. Murray himself later published Cantos III-V (1821) but then refused the increasingly controversial later cantos, which Byron placed instead with the publisher John Hunt, who issued Cantos VI-VIII, IX-XI, and XII-XIV in 1823 and Cantos XV-XVI in 1824. A first edition of the…. Nineteenth-century and later collected editions combining all sixteen cantos of Don Juan under one later title page and a uniform binding are convenient reading texts but are not first editions of any individual canto installment, and none of these prints the Southey dedication as it would have appeared in 1819.

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