# Is "Harlem Shadows" by Claude McKay a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay (Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1922) is identified by: First edition, first printing carries NO statement of edition or printing on the copyright page — first printings are unstated, and any printing statement present indicates a later impression. CENSUS CLAIM CORRECTED — the "UK-precedence trap" is a mis-framing.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, first printing carries NO statement of edition or printing on the copyright page — first printings are unstated, and any printing statement present indicates a later impression
- Octavo, xxii, 95 pp.; contains McKay's "Author's Word" and an introduction by Max Eastman; over 50 poems collected in book form for the first time, including "If We Must Die," "The Harlem Dancer," "The Lynching," and "The White City." BINDING VARIANTS, NO PRIORITY ESTABLISHED: copies are recorded (a) in half navy/blue cloth spine over grey marbled paper-covered boards with a printed paper label to the spine, and (b) in crimson-brown cloth with a printed paper spine label
- Dealers explicitly state no priority is known between these bindings; do not represent either as the first state
- The printed paper spine label is present in all recorded states and is commonly chipped or lacking
- The dust jacket is scarce and absent from most surviving copies
- Publisher imprint reads Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Claude McKay |
| Publisher | Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York |
| Year | 1922 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition, first printing carries NO statement of edition or printing on the copyright page — first printings are unstated, and any… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition, first printing carries NO statement of edition or printing on the copyright page — first printings are unstated, and any printing statement present indicates a later impression. Octavo, xxii, 95 pp.; contains McKay's "Author's Word" and an introduction by Max Eastman; over 50 poems collected in book form for the first time, including "If We Must Die," "The Harlem Dancer," "The Lynching," and "The White City." BINDING VARIANTS, NO PRIORITY ESTABLISHED: copies are recorded (a) in half navy/blue cloth spine over grey marbled paper-covered boards with a printed paper label to the spine, and (b) in crimson-brown cloth with a printed paper spine label. Dealers explicitly state no priority is known between these bindings; do not represent either as the first state. The printed paper spine label is present in all recorded states and is commonly chipped or lacking. The dust jacket is scarce and absent from most surviving copies.

## Is this the true first?
CENSUS CLAIM CORRECTED — the "UK-precedence trap" is a mis-framing. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1922 IS the true and only first edition of Harlem Shadows; no British edition of this title precedes or is contemporaneous with it, and it was McKay's first and only American poetry collection published in his lifetime. The earlier London book is a DIFFERENT TITLE, not an earlier edition of this one: Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Grant Richards, London, 1920), a slim octavo of 40 pp. in fragile original tan wrappers with the original front cover label, frontispiece portrait, 31 poems, preface by I. A. Richards dated in print "September, 1920." All but five of its 31 poems were later reprinted in Harlem Shadows, which is the source of the confusion — but textual overlap is not edition precedence. Both books are collected in their own right, and Spring in New Hampshire is decidedly the scarcer. Harlem Shadows is McKay's fourth collection; his 1912 Jamaican-dialect volumes Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads precede everything here.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue is documented in any source consulted for the 1922 Harcourt edition. The reprint field for this title is modern (e.g., later scholarly and trade reissues), all readily distinguished by imprint and date; the practical risk on this title is the binding-variant question and the unstated-first rule being read as a printing statement's absence in a later, rebound copy.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Harlem Shadows* by Claude McKay a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/harlem-shadows
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.