# Is "The Vampyre: A Tale" by John William Polidori a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Vampyre: A Tale by John William Polidori (Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, London, 1819) is identified by: First book edition, London 1819: octavo, pp. The tale first appeared in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, 1 April 1819, misattributed to Byron; the separate London 1819 book edition is the collected first.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First book edition, London 1819: octavo, pp. xxv, [i], [27]-84, some copies with a publisher's catalogue dated January 1819 bound in
- Viets records five issues — two with the Henry Colburn imprint (the first, naming Byron, presumed lost; the second surviving in a handful of copies), then three with the Sherwood, Neely, and Jones imprint
- The first Sherwood issue retains the fraudulent title-page attribution to the Right Honourable Lord Byron; the second Sherwood issue, the earliest generally obtainable, drops Byron from the title and keeps the early-state points: the preface passage on 'two sisters as the partakers of his revels,' the Frankenstein footnote, and the page 36 misprint 'lmost' for 'almost.' Later issues reset the preliminaries (preface reset from 24 to 23 lines) and remove or correct these readings
- Publisher imprint reads Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, London
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | John William Polidori |
| Publisher | Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, London |
| Year | 1819 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | First book edition, London 1819: octavo, pp. xxv, [i], [27]-84, some copies with a publisher's catalogue dated January 1819 bound in |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
First book edition, London 1819: octavo, pp. xxv, [i], [27]-84, some copies with a publisher's catalogue dated January 1819 bound in. Viets records five issues — two with the Henry Colburn imprint (the first, naming Byron, presumed lost; the second surviving in a handful of copies), then three with the Sherwood, Neely, and Jones imprint. The first Sherwood issue retains the fraudulent title-page attribution to the Right Honourable Lord Byron; the second Sherwood issue, the earliest generally obtainable, drops Byron from the title and keeps the early-state points: the preface passage on 'two sisters as the partakers of his revels,' the Frankenstein footnote, and the page 36 misprint 'lmost' for 'almost.' Later issues reset the preliminaries (preface reset from 24 to 23 lines) and remove or correct these readings.

## Is this the true first?
The tale first appeared in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, 1 April 1819, misattributed to Byron; the separate London 1819 book edition is the collected first. The census claim of Sherwood, Neely, and Jones is correct for obtainable copies, but the technical first issues carry Henry Colburn's imprint and were suppressed — worth stating precisely in the record.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Within-edition tells: reset 23-line preface, removal of the 'two sisters' passage and Frankenstein footnote, and corrected 'almost' on p. 36 all mark later issues of 1819.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Vampyre: A Tale* by John William Polidori a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-vampyre-a-tale
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.