6 Ezra Pound first editions are documented on this shelf, from A Lume Spento (1908) to The Pisan Cantos (1948) across 5 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Ezra Pound 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 Ezra Pound copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- A Lume Spento — 1908 · Printed by A. Antonini, VeniceTitle page bears the imprint of A. Antonini, Cannaregio 923, Venice, 1908, with the title-page verso noting publication 'in the city of Aldus'; Pound paid for and supervised the printing himself, on paper left over from the press's recent history of the church. Collation 2 leaves + 72 pages, about 21 cm; the verso of the dedication leaf and page 58 are blank. Dedicated to the Philadelphia painter William Brooke…. The Venice 1908 printing is the true first and precedes all UK and US Pound publication — the census claim is confirmed. There is no original-language question: the poems are in English and only the title is Italian, so the Italian imprint is a printing fact, not a translation-precedence fact. Sequence worth stating precisely: A Lume Spento (Venice, 1908) is Pound's first book; A Quinzaine for This Yule followed…. No book-club issue. The dominant trap is the New Directions (New York, 1965) 'A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems,' printed in roughly 6,500 copies, which reprints A Lume Spento together with A Quinzaine for This Yule plus previously unpublished early poems — and which includes facsimiles of the original 1908 title and dedication pages plus a bibliographic note, which is precisely what misleads a scanner or a….
- Personae — 1909 · Elkin Mathews, LondonElkin Mathews, London, 1909; 12mo, 59 pages; Gallup A3a. Binding is publisher's grey/drab paper-covered boards (some dealers describe the shade as grey-green), stamped in gilt; issued without a dust jacket, as was normal for Mathews at this date, so no jacket should be expected or looked for. The issue point is the height of the gilt spine title: the first issue has spine stamping measuring 2 cm, the second issue…. UK true first, confirmed, with one refinement the census got slightly wrong: Personae is Pound's first regularly (commercially) published book, not his first book — it is preceded by the privately printed A Lume Spento (Venice, 1908) and A Quinzaine for This Yule (1908). There is no US edition of this 1909 title, so American and British collectors alike take the Elkin Mathews London printing as the first; there…. The confusion the census flags is real and is the principal trap. Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (Boni & Liveright, New York, 1926 — including Ripostes, Lustra, Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) is an entirely different and much later book: 231 pages, black cloth stamped in gilt, first published December 1926 with a second printing in February 1927. It is routinely listed simply….
- Cathay — 1915 · Elkin Mathews, LondonFirst edition: Elkin Mathews, London, published 6 April 1915 in an edition of 1,000 copies — Gallup A9, the standard citation, confirmed by independent ABAA/UK dealer catalogues. A slim 32-page pamphlet, the sheets string-sewn into publisher's printed wrappers lettered in black; dealers describe the wrapper stock variously as drab, buff or brown, so the shade alone should not be treated as a state point. There is…. UK-only true first; there is no separate American edition of Cathay, and the census claim is confirmed on that point but needs one correction of sequence. The Cathay poems were first reprinted not in the American Lustra but in the London Lustra (Elkin Mathews, 1916), where they appear without "The Seafarer" and with four additional Chinese poems; the New York Lustra of Ezra Pound (Alfred A. Knopf, 1917) followed.…. No book-club issue. The reprint tells are the collected appearances rather than separate editions: the poems folded into Lustra (London 1916; New York, Knopf, 1917), then into Personae and the New Directions collected volumes. Modern separate reissues are clearly identifiable — the New Directions Cathay: The Centennial Edition (2015) and the Fordham Cathay: A Critical Edition (2019, ed. Billings, Bush, Saussy)….
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — 1920 · The Ovid PressTrue first: The Ovid Press, London, completed April 1920; limited to 200 numbered copies (15 on Japan vellum numbered 1-15 and not for sale, 20 signed copies numbered 16-35, and 165 unsigned copies numbered 36-200). Printed and published by John Rodker at his Ovid Press, with woodcut initials by Edward Wadsworth. Identified by the Ovid Press colophon and limitation statement. The Ovid Press edition (London, 1920) is the true first; there was no contemporaneous American edition. No book club edition. Later collected appearances of the Mauberley sequence carry different imprints.
- A Draft of XXX Cantos — 1930 · Hours PressTrue first: Hours Press (Nancy Cunard), Paris, 1930. The edition comprised 200 copies on ordinary paper plus a small number of special copies (10 on Texas Mountain paper and 2 on vellum). Capitals designed by Dorothy Shakespear Pound. This precedes the first American edition (Farrar & Rinehart, 1933) and the Faber trade edition. The Hours Press Paris edition (1930) is the true first. The Farrar & Rinehart American edition (1933) and the Faber UK edition are later trade firsts. No book club edition. The trade editions are distinguished by imprint, later date, and the absence of the Hours Press limitation.
- The Pisan Cantos — 1948 · New Directions, New YorkNew Directions, New York, published 30 July 1948; Gallup A60a; Connolly, The Modern Movement, 100. 1,525 copies printed. Binding is original fine-grained black cloth lettered in silver to the spine. The dust jacket is buff paper lettered in green with an illustration of Pound in profile on the front panel; refer to it only as a priced jacket / price present at the flap. Jacket state point, offered with a caveat:…. US true first, confirmed against an academic bibliography and a dealer description independently: New Directions published in New York on 30 July 1948, ahead of the first UK edition from Faber & Faber, London, published 22 July 1949. Both are collected — the Faber is the first English edition and a separate setting, not an import of the New Directions sheets. The census claim of US precedence is correct. No book-club issue is documented for this title. The reprint tells are later New Directions printings, the Sixth Avenue jacket state noted above, and the modern New Directions Paperbook edition (ISBN 9780811215589) edited and annotated by Richard Sieburth, which is a first thus and is the copy most often mistaken for the 1948 book on title alone. One correction of emphasis to the census note: The Pisan Cantos did….
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