# Is "Poems (Hogarth Press)" by T. S. Eliot a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Poems (Hogarth Press) by T. S. Eliot (The Hogarth Press, Richmond, 1919) is identified by: First edition, Gallup A5 (Woolmer's Hogarth checklist also records it). UK-only; no US edition of this collection exists, and no original-language question arises.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, Gallup A5 (Woolmer's Hogarth checklist also records it)
- Hand-set and hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth House, Richmond, and published May 1919 in an edition of about 250 copies covering both issues; it sold out and was out of print by the middle of 1920
- A pamphlet of roughly thirteen pages gathering seven poems, among them 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales', 'Whispers of Immortality' and 'Mr
- Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'
- There is no limitation statement and no number line, so identification rests on the imprint — 'Printed and published by L. & V. Woolf at The Hogarth Press, Hogarth House, Richmond
- 1919' — together with the wrappers and the front-cover label
- Publisher imprint reads The Hogarth Press, Richmond

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | T. S. Eliot |
| Publisher | The Hogarth Press, Richmond |
| Year | 1919 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition, Gallup A5 (Woolmer's Hogarth checklist also records it) |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
First edition, Gallup A5 (Woolmer's Hogarth checklist also records it). Hand-set and hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth House, Richmond, and published May 1919 in an edition of about 250 copies covering both issues; it sold out and was out of print by the middle of 1920. A pamphlet of roughly thirteen pages gathering seven poems, among them 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales', 'Whispers of Immortality' and 'Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'. There is no limitation statement and no number line, so identification rests on the imprint — 'Printed and published by L. & V. Woolf at The Hogarth Press, Hogarth House, Richmond. 1919' — together with the wrappers and the front-cover label. Earliest copies are sewn into hand-decorated marbled paper wrappers (the Woolfs' Japanese cover paper, marbled for them by Pamela Fry) with the front-cover paper label lettered in RED; later copies of the same printing carry a white label lettered in BLACK. Gallup and Woolmer additionally record an uncorrected first-state reading, 'capitaux', corrected in later copies; dealers who cite this point handle it as a text state within the printing rather than a separate edition. Never issued in a dust jacket, and the wrappers split at the spine ends as a matter of course.

## Is this the true first?
UK-only; no US edition of this collection exists, and no original-language question arises. The census claim is confirmed: the Hogarth Poems precedes both Ara Vos Prec (The Ovid Press, London, February 1920) and any American collection. Two clarifications the census omits. First, this is not Eliot's first book — Prufrock and Other Observations (The Egoist, London, 1917) is. Second, the seven poems were afterwards absorbed into Ara Vos Prec and into the differently arranged US collection Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1920), whose sequence Pound arranged while Eliot set the order of Ara Vos Prec. Those two are firsts of their own contents, not editions of the Hogarth pamphlet — a first-thus trap in both directions.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue exists and the pamphlet was never reprinted by the Press, so the trap is a title mix-up rather than a club copy. The far commoner Knopf Poems (New York, 1920) and Faber's later Poems collections are routinely catalogued simply as 'Eliot, Poems'; check the imprint for the Woolfs' names, Hogarth House and Richmond. Any copy in publisher's cloth, any copy in a dust jacket, and any machine-printed copy is not the 1919 pamphlet.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Poems (Hogarth Press)* by T. S. Eliot a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/poems-hogarth-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.