# Is "Utopia" by Thomas More a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Utopia by Thomas More (Thierry, 1516) is identified by: Louvain: Thierry (Dirk) Martens, December 1516, quarto, in Latin — the census claim is confirmed. The Latin Louvain 1516 is the true first and precedes all.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Louvain: Thierry (Dirk) Martens, December 1516, quarto, in Latin — the census claim is confirmed
- Title begins 'Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip. statu, deque nova insula Utopia', with the title naming More as citizen and undersheriff of London and crediting Pieter Gillis (Peter Giles) of Antwerp as editor; the edition was seen through the press under Erasmus's direction
- The 1516 Louvain first contains a woodcut map of the island of Utopia — ANONYMOUS and comparatively crude — together with the 22-letter Utopian alphabet and quatrain, verses by Gillis, Gerard Geldenhouwer and Cornelius Grapheus, and More's dedicatory letter to Gillis
- The map is the critical discriminator: the elegant bird's-eye map everyone recognises is by Ambrosius Holbein and was made for Froben's Basel edition of 1518, which also introduced the woodcut of the interlocutors and a Hans Holbein title-page border
- A copy with the Holbein map is a Basel 1518, not the Louvain first
- Publisher imprint reads Thierry
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Thomas More |
| Publisher | Thierry |
| Year | 1516 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Louvain: Thierry (Dirk) Martens, December 1516, quarto, in Latin — the census claim is confirmed |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Louvain: Thierry (Dirk) Martens, December 1516, quarto, in Latin — the census claim is confirmed. Title begins 'Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip. statu, deque nova insula Utopia', with the title naming More as citizen and undersheriff of London and crediting Pieter Gillis (Peter Giles) of Antwerp as editor; the edition was seen through the press under Erasmus's direction. The 1516 Louvain first contains a woodcut map of the island of Utopia — ANONYMOUS and comparatively crude — together with the 22-letter Utopian alphabet and quatrain, verses by Gillis, Gerard Geldenhouwer and Cornelius Grapheus, and More's dedicatory letter to Gillis. The map is the critical discriminator: the elegant bird's-eye map everyone recognises is by Ambrosius Holbein and was made for Froben's Basel edition of 1518, which also introduced the woodcut of the interlocutors and a Hans Holbein title-page border. A copy with the Holbein map is a Basel 1518, not the Louvain first.

## Is this the true first?
The Latin Louvain 1516 is the true first and precedes all. Sequence of the early Latin editions: Louvain, Martens, December 1516 (first); Paris, Gilles de Gourmont, 1517 (second); Basel, Johann Froben, March 1518 and again November 1518 — the November Basel is the revised text and the most-reproduced, and is frequently miscalled 'the first' because of the Holbein map. Both the Latin first and the first in English are collected. The first English is Ralph Robinson's translation, 'A fruteful and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia', London: Abraham Vele, 1551 — a full 35 years after the Latin and 16 years after More's execution. Robinson's revised second edition of 1556 is a separate, later edition and drops the dedicatory letter; it is not the first in English.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club era applies to the 16th-century printings, and no book-club tells are documented. The realistic encounters are modern scholarly and reprint editions — the Yale Edition of the Complete Works, Cambridge Texts, Everyman's Library, Modern Library, and press facsimiles of the 1516 or 1518 sheets — all first thus at best. A facsimile is identified by modern paper, a modern editorial introduction, and a publisher's imprint and date on the verso or in the colophon.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Utopia* by Thomas More a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/utopia
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.