# Is "Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave" by Aphra Behn a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn (William Canning, London, 1688) is identified by: First edition: "Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. The census claim is confirmed: London 1688, printed for William Canning, is the true first, and there is no rival UK/US or original-language edition — Behn wrote in English and no earlier printing exists.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition: "Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave
- A True History
- A. Behn," London, "Printed for Will
- Canning, at his Shop in the Temple-Cloysters," 1688; octavo
- Wing B1749
- The collation runs [16], 112, 129-239, [1] pp. — the pagination jumps from 112 to 129 because the leaves of that gathering were simply left unnumbered while the text runs on continuously, so a copy showing that gap is complete rather than defective; this is the single most common false alarm raised against genuine copies and the point most worth publishing
- Publisher imprint reads William Canning, London

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Aphra Behn |
| Publisher | William Canning, London |
| Year | 1688 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First edition: "Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition: "Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. A True History. By Mrs. A. Behn," London, "Printed for Will. Canning, at his Shop in the Temple-Cloysters," 1688; octavo; Wing B1749. The collation runs [16], 112, 129-239, [1] pp. — the pagination jumps from 112 to 129 because the leaves of that gathering were simply left unnumbered while the text runs on continuously, so a copy showing that gap is complete rather than defective; this is the single most common false alarm raised against genuine copies and the point most worth publishing. The preliminaries carry the dedication "To the Right Honourable the Lord Maitland." The book is extraordinarily rare: about thirteen copies were recorded, all institutional (British Library, Oxford and Yale among them), until a fourteenth surfaced in private hands in Kent in 2024, and no copy has appeared on the open market in over fifty years — so a copy arriving in a household donation is essentially certain to be a reprint.

## Is this the true first?
The census claim is confirmed: London 1688, printed for William Canning, is the true first, and there is no rival UK/US or original-language edition — Behn wrote in English and no earlier printing exists. The nearest precedence trap is a same-year issue: later in 1688 Canning issued Oroonoko together with "The Fair Jilt" and "Agnes de Castro" as "Three Histories" (Wing B1766A) under a general title, and copies of the separate are commonly found bound with those companion pieces; because a copy lacking the general title can be presented either way, the presence or absence of that general title must be reported rather than assumed. A new edition of the novel followed Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation (staged 1695, printed 1696), after which the novel was never out of print in the eighteenth century — Southerne's play is a separate work and is not an edition of Behn's novel.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club printing of the 1688 exists. Everything in circulation is modern: Penguin Classics (ed. Janet Todd), Norton Critical, Broadview, Dover, university-press teaching editions, collected "Works of Aphra Behn" sets, and print-on-demand facsimiles struck from EEBO microfilm (BiblioBazaar, Gale ECCO and similar). Any copy with an ISBN or barcode, or bearing a modern illustrator's name on the title, is a reprint.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave* by Aphra Behn a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/oroonoko-or-the-royal-slave
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.