2 William Morris first editions are documented on this shelf, from News from Nowhere (1891) to The Well at the World's End (1896) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that William Morris 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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- News from Nowhere — 1891 · Reeves & TurnerFirst English trade edition, the text revised by Morris himself from its 1890 serialization in the Commonweal, published by Reeves & Turner in 1891 (with further printings from the same setting in April 1891, June 1891, and March 1892). A large-paper edition limited to 250 copies, bound in publisher's parchment-style spine over matte blue boards with a printed spine label, was issued alongside the ordinary trade…. Morris's own Kelmscott Press issued a deluxe edition dated 1892 (300 copies on paper, 10 on vellum), reset from the corrected Reeves & Turner text with a woodcut frontispiece of Kelmscott Manor by Charles Gere and decorated initials; the Kelmscott printing is a distinct later deluxe edition, not the first trade edition, and should not be confused with it.
- The Well at the World's End — 1896 · Kelmscott PressTwo 1896 editions must be distinguished, and a description that names only one is incomplete. The Kelmscott Press book (Hammersmith, dated 2 March 1896, issued 4 June 1896; Peterson A39) is limited to 350 copies on paper, printed in Chaucer type with chapter and shoulder titles in red, four large woodcut illustrations after Edward Burne-Jones, and Morris's woodcut initials and borders, issued in publisher's limp…. The Kelmscott limited does not simply 'precede' the Longmans, Green trade edition: that is only half right, and backwards on printing. Peterson A39 (William S. Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, Clarendon Press, 1984) records that the Kelmscott text was set FROM the sheets of the Longmans edition then being printed at the Chiswick Press; those Chiswick/Longmans sheets were finished in 1894 and…. No book-club edition is documented in the sources consulted for either 1896 issue. Reprint tells are structural rather than textual: the Longmans first is a 2-volume set in linen-backed boards with printed paper spine labels, so any one-volume 'Well at the World's End' in ordinary publisher's cloth is a later printing or reprint. A Kelmscott claim must be supported by Chaucer type, the four Burne-Jones woodcuts,….
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