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.
Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a William Morris copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- 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…. CENSUS CLAIM CORRECTED. The claim that the Kelmscott limited simply 'precedes' the Longmans, Green trade edition is only half right, and is 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…. 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,….
More Poetry, Beat & Drama shelves: William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Yusef Komunyakaa, A. E. Housman, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne.
← All authors · All genres · part of the First-Edition Identification resource.