3 Derek Walcott first editions are documented on this shelf, from In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) to Omeros (1990) across 3 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Derek Walcott title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.
Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a Derek Walcott copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 — 1962 · Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape (London) first edition, first impression, 'first published 1962' so stated; quarter cloth over patterned paper boards with a priced dust jacket, around 79 pages. Walcott's first collection issued by a major international publisher. UK Cape is the true first as Walcott's first book published outside the Caribbean. It is not his earliest book overall — privately and locally printed West Indian volumes (25 Poems, 1948; Epitaph for the Young; Poems) preceded it. Among his commercially distributed trade books this is the earliest and is much scarcer than his later Farrar, Straus and Giroux titles. No book-club edition; later printings add a printing statement.
- The Castaway and Other Poems — 1965 · Jonathan Cape, LondonFirst edition, Jonathan Cape, London, 1965. Octavo, 62 pp., thirty-three poems; Walcott's third book published in the UK. Bound in cloth-backed patterned paper boards, in dust jacket; the jacket should carry the price at the flap (priced jacket). Beyond the 1965 Cape imprint and the cloth-backed patterned-board binding, no separately documented first-issue textual point, state or number line is recorded in the…. UK only: Jonathan Cape, London, 1965 is the true and only separate first edition. There is no separate American edition of The Castaway. In the US, a selection from the collection appeared inside The Gulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1970), which combines the whole of the UK collection The Gulf and Other Poems (Cape, 1969) with poems drawn from The Castaway. The FSG volume is therefore the first American…. No book-club issue documented. Cape reissued the collection in a different format in 1969 and reprinted it in 1972 and 1978; the 1969 Cape paperback circulates and is a later 'first thus', not the first edition. The other common trap is FSG's The Gulf (1970), offered where Castaway poems are sought.
- Omeros — 1990 · Farrar, Straus and GirouxFarrar, Straus and Giroux first edition, 1990, with the FSG first-edition statement on the copyright page; cloth in a dust jacket priced on the flap. Book-length Caribbean epic that helped secure his 1992 Nobel Prize. Published in 1990 in the US by FSG (simultaneously in Canada by Collins) and in the UK by Faber and Faber; the editions are effectively simultaneous, so confirm precedence against your collecting goal. FSG is the US first. No book-club edition; later printings carry a printing statement.
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