3 Percy Bysshe Shelley first editions are documented on this shelf, from Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: With Notes (1813) to Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821) across 3 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Percy Bysshe Shelley 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 Percy Bysshe Shelley copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.
- Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: With Notes — 1813 · Printed by P. B. Shelley; no trade publisher named on the title pagePrivately printed in an edition of only 250 copies for distribution among friends and never offered for public sale. Shelley's own name and address appear on the title page as printer because Thomas Hookham, the bookseller who arranged the printing, would not have his name attached to so radical a work. Fearing prosecution for the poem's attacks on monarchy, organized religion, and marriage, Shelley "mutilated"…. An unauthorized and textually altered piracy of Queen Mab was issued by the bookseller William Clark in 1821, which Shelley tried unsuccessfully to suppress through the courts. That 1821 piracy has no standing as an edition sanctioned by Shelley and must not be confused with the true 1813 privately printed first edition. Once Shelley's later fame made Queen Mab commercially desirable to publishers, numerous authorized and unauthorized nineteenth-century reprints followed; any copy naming a trade publisher on the title page, or dated after 1813, is one of these later printings rather than the original private edition.
- Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems — 1820 · C. and J. Ollier, LondonFirst edition, octavo (approx. 211 x 137 mm), pp. 222, published summer 1820 (August; the Shelleys, resident in Italy, did not receive a copy until November). The issue point is the CONTENTS leaf, signature A3: in the FIRST issue that leaf is integral and carries 'Miscellaneous' MISSPELLED; in the second issue the word is spelled correctly and leaf A3 is a CANCEL - the physical cancel is the test, and Peter…. Publisher, city and year in the census are correct: C. and J. Ollier, London, 1820. Two corrections. First, the title is incomplete as given - the volume is 'Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems', and the 'Other Poems' matter is the point of the book for many collectors, containing 'Ode to the West Wind', 'To a Skylark' and 'The Cloud' in their first appearances. Second, the census's…. No book-club issue at this date. The dominant trap is the second issue sold as simply 'first edition' - technically correct (both issues are the 1820 first edition) but the corrected, cancelled-A3 state is the common one, and catalogs that say only 'first edition' without addressing A3 should be read as unplaced. Check whether A3 is integral or a cancel by collation, not by the reading alone. Also watch for….
- Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats — 1821 · With the Types of DidotFirst edition, a quarto pamphlet of 25 pages comprising the 55-stanza, 495-line elegy in Spenserian stanzas, prefaced by Shelley's attack on the Quarterly Review's hostile treatment of Keats's Endymion, which Shelley believed had hastened Keats's death. Shelley personally supervised the Pisa printing, carried out under the direction of the printer Niccolò Capurro, in an edition of about 300 copies. Issued in…. Mary Shelley's posthumous collected editions of Shelley's Poetical Works, beginning in 1824, print a revised text of Adonais with wording changes from the 1821 Pisa text; a copy within any collected edition of Shelley's works is not the stand-alone 1821 Pisa first edition.
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