# Is "Jill" by Philip Larkin a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Jill by Philip Larkin (The Fortune Press, 1946) is identified by: First edition, The Fortune Press, London, 1946; Bloomfield A2(a). Census claim CONFIRMED: The Fortune Press, London, 1946 is the true first, Larkin's first novel and his second book.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, The Fortune Press, London, 1946
- Bloomfield A2(a)
- There is no printing statement and no number line — Fortune Press books carry none — so identification rests on the 1946 title page with the Fortune Press imprint and the absence of any later publisher's name or of Larkin's 1964 Introduction
- Cloth colour is NOT a priority point and must not be used as one: Bloomfield records that the Fortune Press bound up small quantities of a title at a time using binding cloths acquired cheaply, and copies are found in blue grained buckram, green cloth, straw/buff buckram, and black cloth spine with pebbled sides, among others, with no priority established between them
- ABA/ILAB dealers regularly catalogue variants not recorded by Bloomfield at all
- A frequently seen state is blue grained buckram lettered in gilt to the spine, top edge speckled red, other edges uncut
- Publisher imprint reads The Fortune Press

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Philip Larkin |
| Publisher | The Fortune Press |
| Year | 1946 |
| True first | American edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition, The Fortune Press, London, 1946 |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition, The Fortune Press, London, 1946; Bloomfield A2(a). There is no printing statement and no number line — Fortune Press books carry none — so identification rests on the 1946 title page with the Fortune Press imprint and the absence of any later publisher's name or of Larkin's 1964 Introduction. Cloth colour is NOT a priority point and must not be used as one: Bloomfield records that the Fortune Press bound up small quantities of a title at a time using binding cloths acquired cheaply, and copies are found in blue grained buckram, green cloth, straw/buff buckram, and black cloth spine with pebbled sides, among others, with no priority established between them; ABA/ILAB dealers regularly catalogue variants not recorded by Bloomfield at all. A frequently seen state is blue grained buckram lettered in gilt to the spine, top edge speckled red, other edges uncut. A buff dustwrapper printed in red was issued and is notoriously fragile, seldom surviving; this jacket detail rests on dealer cataloguing (Jonkers) rather than on the bibliography and should be treated as provisional.

## Is this the true first?
Census claim CONFIRMED: The Fortune Press, London, 1946 is the true first, Larkin's first novel and his second book. No contemporaneous American edition exists, so no precedence contest arises. Two later-issue traps must be named. Faber & Faber (London) reissued the novel in 1964 with a new Introduction by Larkin recalling wartime Oxford — a classic 'first thus,' not a first edition, and the single most common misidentification of this title. The first US edition followed from St Martin's Press, New York, but sources disagree on the year: general reference gives 1965 while several dealer listings give 1964, so the census's flat '1964' should not be relied upon and is left unresolved here.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue is documented for the 1946 Fortune Press printing; the press printed in small quantities and issued nothing through the clubs. The reprint tells that matter are imprint-based rather than blind-stamp based: any copy naming Faber & Faber (or a later publisher) on the title page is a reprint, and any copy containing Larkin's Introduction is 1964 or later, since that text is absent from the 1946 first. Because the Fortune Press cloth varies so widely, do not treat an unfamiliar binding as evidence of a reprint — check the imprint and the absence of the Introduction instead.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Jill* by Philip Larkin a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/jill
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.