# Is "Faust. Eine Tragödie (Part One)" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Faust. Eine Tragödie (Part One) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, Tübingen, 1808) is identified by: The census claim needs correcting on precedence within 1808. A German original; the precedence question is internal to Cotta's 1808 output rather than UK-versus-US.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- The census claim needs correcting on precedence within 1808
- The first printing of the completed Part One is the one inside Goethe's Werke, Achter Band (Tübingen: Cotta, 1808): the scholarly Historisch-kritische Faustedition assigns that printing the siglum A and states that the separately published editions derive from the printings within the collected editions, D.1
- going back to A. German antiquarian listings match this, cataloguing the volume expressly as 'Erstdruck in: Goethe's Werke, Achter Band' — 8vo (approx
- 18.4 x 11.5 cm), 376 pp., followed by the poem 'Lili's Park' at pp
- 377-380 carrying the footnote that it was intended for the first volume (cited as Hagen 16, A8)
- The separate 'Faust
- Publisher imprint reads J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, Tübingen

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
| Publisher | J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, Tübingen |
| Year | 1808 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | The census claim needs correcting on precedence within 1808 |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
The census claim needs correcting on precedence within 1808. The first printing of the completed Part One is the one inside Goethe's Werke, Achter Band (Tübingen: Cotta, 1808): the scholarly Historisch-kritische Faustedition assigns that printing the siglum A and states that the separately published editions derive from the printings within the collected editions, D.1 (1808) going back to A. German antiquarian listings match this, cataloguing the volume expressly as 'Erstdruck in: Goethe's Werke, Achter Band' — 8vo (approx. 18.4 x 11.5 cm), 376 pp., followed by the poem 'Lili's Park' at pp. 377-380 carrying the footnote that it was intended for the first volume (cited as Hagen 16, A8). The separate 'Faust. Eine Tragödie' of the same year (Tübingen: Cotta, 1808; approx. 309 pp.) is Hagen 310 and is correctly called the first separate edition (erste Einzelausgabe) — not the first printing, though it is very often catalogued as the first edition. A single dealer description additionally cites a re-imposed setting of gathering A with press corrections chiefly orthographic and punctuational; that point is single-sourced and should be treated as unconfirmed.

## Is this the true first?
A German original; the precedence question is internal to Cotta's 1808 output rather than UK-versus-US. 'Faust. Ein Fragment' (Leipzig: bey Georg Joachim Göschen, 1790) precedes it and is separately collected as the first published version of Faust: small 8vo (157 x 95 mm), [2], 168 pp., half-title signed A, with the first issue identified by the three repeated lines at the foot of p. 144 and the head of p. 145 together with the printing errors — and it too was issued both within Goethe's Schriften and as a separate issue, the separately issued sheets taking a letterpress title in place of the engraved frontispiece and vignette title. In English, Abraham Hayward's prose version (London: Edward Moxon, February 1833) is generally described as the first English translation to render Part One in full rather than bridging passages with prose summary; earlier verse attempts (the anonymous 'Faustus' of 1821 and Lord Francis Leveson Gower's of 1823) are partial or abridged, so 'first complete English translation' is a defensible but contested description and should be stated with that qualification.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issues exist for this title. The live trap here is the inverse of the usual one: the separate 1808 volume looks like the first edition and is routinely offered as such, when the first printing sits inside Werke, Achter Band of the same year and the same Cotta Tübingen imprint. Later Cotta collections — including the Ausgabe letzter Hand (1827-1830) — reprint Part One within multi-volume sets and are frequently mistaken for a Faust I first; check whether the Faust text stands alone or is embedded in a numbered collected-works volume, and collate the pagination (376 pp. plus 'Lili's Park' at 377-380 for the Werke volume, approx. 309 pp. for the separate).

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Faust. Eine Tragödie (Part One)* by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/faust-eine-trag-die-part-one
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.