Common Sense

Philadelphia is the true first - there is no earlier London or foreign edition, and the census claim that Bell's anonymous Philadelphia printing of 10 January 1776 is the true first is confirmed. The traps are all downstream and all dated 1776. Bell's own unauthorised "second edition" of 27 January 1776 is largely the same setting: the compositor simply reset the first line, dropping the dateline and substituting "The Second Edition" in a larger font - so a copy can look like first-edition sheets and not be one. The genuinely enlarged edition is Bradford's, advertised 14 February 1776 (Gimbel CS-12; Evans 14959), which adds Paine's Appendix and his "Address to the People called Quakers" and is the third edition overall, not a first. Separately, "Large Additions to Common Sense" (Bell, 1776) is Bell's own compilation gathered from various sources - it is not by Paine and is often bound in at the end of first-edition sheets. Dozens of further 1776 colonial and British reprints follow, the earliest outside Philadelphia apparently New York: John Anderson, 15 February 1776 (Gimbel CS-40; Evans 14956).