Hunger (Sult)

The true first edition is the original-language 1890 Sult, P.G. Philipsens Forlag, Copenhagen (Dano-Norwegian text). The first English-language edition is Hunger, translated by George Egerton (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne), published by Leonard Smithers and Co., London, 1899 — publisher's grey cloth stamped in black, octavo, collating x, 312 pp. plus publisher's ads. This Smithers issue also exists in original printed wrappers, which are far scarcer than the cloth (one dealer, Biblioctopus, records only a single wrappers copy in auction records over roughly the last 85 years — a scarcity claim that applies to the 1899 English wrappers issue, NOT to the 1890 Norwegian first). English-speaking collectors should note the 1899 Smithers Egerton translation is the first in English (nine years after the Norwegian original), distinct from the later widely reprinted Knopf issues of the same Egerton translation and from the modern Robert Bly (1967) and Sverre Lyngstad (1996) translations.