# Is "Poems (Egoist Press)" by Marianne Moore a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Poems (Egoist Press) by Marianne Moore (The Egoist Press, London, 1921) is identified by: First edition, Abbott A1 — Moore's first book. UK true first; there is no US edition of this book and no original-language question.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, Abbott A1 — Moore's first book
- The Egoist Press (Harriet Shaw Weaver), London, 1921, printed at the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C. Small octavo, about 21.5 x 14 cm, 24 pp
- (collated 23,[1]), gathering twenty-four poems
- Issued sewn and string-tied in stiff decorated patterned-paper wrappers with a printed paper label on the front cover
- No jacket was issued — glassine, when present, is later protection, as is any clamshell box
- There is no limitation statement and no number line: the Egoist Press imprint and the Pelican Press printer's note are the identification
- Publisher imprint reads The Egoist Press, London

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Marianne Moore |
| Publisher | The Egoist Press, London |
| Year | 1921 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition, Abbott A1 — Moore's first book |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition, Abbott A1 — Moore's first book. The Egoist Press (Harriet Shaw Weaver), London, 1921, printed at the Pelican Press, 2 Carmelite Street, E.C. Small octavo, about 21.5 x 14 cm, 24 pp. (collated 23,[1]), gathering twenty-four poems. Issued sewn and string-tied in stiff decorated patterned-paper wrappers with a printed paper label on the front cover. No jacket was issued — glassine, when present, is later protection, as is any clamshell box. There is no limitation statement and no number line: the Egoist Press imprint and the Pelican Press printer's note are the identification. A house-style tell of the London typesetter is the decorative ligature linking adjacent s-t and c-t pairs on virtually every page, purely ornamental and running throughout. The wrappers are fragile and chipping at the label and the spine fold is the norm; rebound or label-less copies are hard to place. The number of copies printed is not documented in any source located, and no figure is asserted here.

## Is this the true first?
UK true first; there is no US edition of this book and no original-language question. The census claim is confirmed: Poems was arranged in London by H.D. and Bryher with Weaver's agreement and printed without Moore's knowledge or approval — she disapproved of the selection and editing while praising the typography and cover — and it precedes Observations (The Dial Press, New York, 1924). One correction of emphasis the census invites: Observations is NOT the American edition of Poems. It is a separate, larger collection Moore herself assembled, and it was itself revised for a second edition in 1925. Both books are collected as firsts of their own contents; neither supersedes the other, and describing the Dial book as a US issue of the Egoist book is wrong.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue and no contemporaneous reprint — the Egoist Press printing stands alone. The traps are modern: print-on-demand and facsimile reprints of the 1921 sheets carry modern ISBNs (e.g. 9781293822333) while their catalogue records still read 'Egoist Press, publisher; Pelican Press, printer', which reads as a first to a keyword search; and full scans are freely available (Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Wikisource). Any perfect-bound or cased copy, and any copy with an ISBN, is a reprint.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Poems (Egoist Press)* by Marianne Moore a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/poems-egoist-press
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.