Gertrude Stein First Editions

• Three Lives — 1909 · The Grafton PressFirst edition, first issue: The Grafton Press, New York, 1909, 279 pp. Stein paid for the printing herself — Grafton was a subsidy/vanity house — and 1,000 copies were printed. Bound in publisher's dark blue to blue-black vertically-ribbed cloth, titling in gilt on the front cover and the spine; issued without a dust jacket, so a jacketed copy dated 1909 warrants close scrutiny. Standard reference is Wilson A1a…. US Grafton Press, New York, 1909 is the true first and the only edition to collect as such; the census claim is confirmed on precedence but its framing of the 1915 John Lane as a 'UK edition' is misleading and is corrected here. Roughly 700 copies went to the American market; about 300 sets of the same unsold 1909 Grafton sheets were made up for John Lane in London in 1915 with a cancel title leaf, retaining the…. No book-club issue is documented for the 1909 Grafton printing. The later editions are the traps and are all 'first thus': John Lane, London and New York, 1920; John Rodker, London, 1927; and the New Directions issue of 1933 onward. Per Le Bookiniste (citing Wilson A1e), copies in dust jacket are effectively unobtainable before the 1927 Rodker issue — a useful negative check on any jacketed copy claimed as early.
• Tender Buttons — 1914 · Claire MarieTrue first is Claire Marie (New York), 1914 — the vanity imprint of Donald Evans — Stein's second book, published May 1914. Issued in yellow paper-covered boards with a circular two-tone green paste-on title label to the front board; octavo, 78 pp, in three sections (Objects, Food, Rooms). Print run is reported at roughly 1,000 copies (figure not firmly double-sourced, so treat as reported). A slip of Stein's own…. US Claire Marie (1914) is the sole true first; there is no UK edition of the original setting. 'First thus' trap: the City Lights Corrected Centennial Edition (2014) and mid-century resettings (Sun & Moon, Dover, etc.) are modern editions, not the 1914 first. No book-club issue; distinguish the 1914 Claire Marie sheets from all later resettings by the yellow boards and the circular two-tone green label.
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — 1933 · Harcourt, Brace and CompanyFirst edition, first printing: 'First Edition' is stated on the copyright page — that statement is the identification, and its absence marks a later Harcourt printing. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1933; octavo, approximately 310 pp. Bound in publisher's blue to blue-grey cloth stamped in silver, with 'A rose is a rose is a rose is' stamped to form a small circle on the front board. Illustrated with a…. US Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1933 is the accepted true first and the collected edition. John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, published the first English edition the same year; the exact Bodley Head month could not be established from the sources consulted, so the census phrase 'narrowly precedes' is softened here — the American edition is the collected first, but the interval is not documented in these sources.…. Later Harcourt printings drop the 'First Edition' statement from the copyright page while otherwise resembling the first — check the statement before anything else. Subsequent reprint editions and modern trade reissues are 'first thus' traps. No specific book-club issue of the 1933 Harcourt printing is documented in the sources consulted.

More Literary Fiction (US) & Award Winners shelves: Gilbert Sorrentino, G.K. Chesterton, Gloria Naylor, Graham Greene, Graham Swift, Gwyneth Jones.

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