# Is "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (Harper & Brothers, 1949) is identified by: Full title: The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel. Confirms the census.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Full title: The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel
- The decisive point is the Harper & Brothers letter code on the copyright page, which must read "D-Y"
- Under Harper's code the first letter gives the month (A=January through M=December, with J skipped, so D=April) and the second letter gives the year on a cycle that restarted in 1937 (M=1937, N=1938 … X=1948, Y=1949)
- D-Y therefore reads April 1949, agreeing with the 1949 copyright
- Any Harper copy showing a different code, or carrying a later-printing notice, is a subsequent printing
- Bound in publisher's blue cloth
- Publisher imprint reads Harper & Brothers

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Benjamin Graham |
| Publisher | Harper & Brothers |
| Year | 1949 |
| True first | US edition |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Full title: The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Full title: The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel. The decisive point is the Harper & Brothers letter code on the copyright page, which must read "D-Y". Under Harper's code the first letter gives the month (A=January through M=December, with J skipped, so D=April) and the second letter gives the year on a cycle that restarted in 1937 (M=1937, N=1938 … X=1948, Y=1949); D-Y therefore reads April 1949, agreeing with the 1949 copyright. Any Harper copy showing a different code, or carrying a later-printing notice, is a subsequent printing. Bound in publisher's blue cloth; 276 pp with black-and-white charts and graphs. First-issue jacket points reported by dealers: the "Editor of Barron's" quote and the number 7553 on the front flap, with the price present at the flap and unclipped.

## Is this the true first?
Confirms the census. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1949 is the true first; US only — no UK or original-language edition precedes it, and no contemporaneous British issue of consequence has been traced, so there is no precedence question to name. Only the 1949 printing is a first edition of the work: Graham revised the book repeatedly (1954, 1959, 1965, and the widely reprinted 1973 fourth edition), and the 1973 text carrying Jason Zweig's 2003 commentary is the version almost always encountered.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue is documented for the 1949 first. The dominant trap is revised editions and modern reprints: later Harper, Harper & Row and HarperBusiness printings carry the 1949 copyright date on the copyright page alongside the later revision date, which routinely misleads sellers into cataloguing them as 1949 firsts. Read the Harper letter code, not the copyright year. Caveat on strength of evidence: the "D-Y" code and the Harper code table are firmly corroborated (the table is independently validated by fedpo's worked examples), but the "Editor of Barron's" and 7553 front-flap jacket points rest on dealer descriptions from two firms rather than a formal bibliography.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Intelligent Investor* by Benjamin Graham a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-intelligent-investor
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.