A Shropshire Lad

Sales were slow at first but grew markedly during the Boer War and had reached about 13,500 copies a year by 1911, well before the book's best-known association with British soldiers of the First World War; Housman moved to the publisher Grant Richards within a few years, and Richards issued numerous further printings and small pocket editions in different cloth bindings, some with dust jackets. Only the 1896 sheets in the original pale-blue paper boards with a white parchment spine, as described above, constitute the true first edition.