# Is "Murphy" by Samuel Beckett a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Murphy by Samuel Beckett (George Routledge & Sons, 1938) is identified by: First edition, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1938 (Federman & Fletcher 25). The census claim is confirmed: the English original, Routledge, London, 1938, is the true first.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1938 (Federman & Fletcher 25)
- Octavo, 282 pp. plus 4 pp. of advertisements; the title page is dated 1938 with no number line
- The decisive point is the cloth: first-issue copies are bound in smooth green cloth with the spine lettered in gilt, while the unsold balance was bound up in coarse, rough-textured green cloth and released as a "cheap edition" in 1942 — the same sheets in a later binding
- Cloth texture, not colour, separates them
- The dust jacket is very rare and absent from most surviving copies
- Print-run figures conflict across sources and are not settled here: dealers citing Federman & Fletcher 25 give 1,500 copies printed with 718 in the first-issue binding, while other dealer descriptions give 1,250 printed with only about 350 in the smooth first-issue cloth and nearly 900 remaindered in the coarse second binding
- Publisher imprint reads George Routledge & Sons

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| Publisher | George Routledge & Sons |
| Year | 1938 |
| True first | American edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1938 (Federman & Fletcher 25) |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1938 (Federman & Fletcher 25). Octavo, 282 pp. plus 4 pp. of advertisements; the title page is dated 1938 with no number line. The decisive point is the cloth: first-issue copies are bound in smooth green cloth with the spine lettered in gilt, while the unsold balance was bound up in coarse, rough-textured green cloth and released as a "cheap edition" in 1942 — the same sheets in a later binding. Cloth texture, not colour, separates them. The dust jacket is very rare and absent from most surviving copies. Print-run figures conflict across sources and are not settled here: dealers citing Federman & Fletcher 25 give 1,500 copies printed with 718 in the first-issue binding, while other dealer descriptions give 1,250 printed with only about 350 in the smooth first-issue cloth and nearly 900 remaindered in the coarse second binding. The binding point itself is consistent across all sources consulted; the counts are not.

## Is this the true first?
The census claim is confirmed: the English original, Routledge, London, 1938, is the true first. Beckett's own French translation — made with unacknowledged assistance from Alfred Péron — followed from Éditions Bordas, Paris, 1947, as the first volume in the "Les Imaginaires" series, and the first American edition is Grove Press, New York, 1957. There is no competing English-language edition before 1957, so precedence is not contested.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club edition is documented. The reprint tell is the 1942 Routledge "cheap edition" — first-edition sheets in coarse green cloth, frequently offered as a first edition, which it is, but not in the first-issue binding. A distinct "first thus" trap sits on the French side: at the end of 1953 Les Éditions de Minuit acquired roughly 2,750 unsold Bordas copies and reissued them under their own wrappers in early 1954, so a Minuit-wrappered Murphy is a re-issue of the 1947 Bordas first in French, not a new edition.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Murphy* by Samuel Beckett a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/murphy
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.