Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the Kilmarnock Burns)

Kilmarnock 1786 is the true first and there is no rival — English/Scots is the original language and no earlier edition exists. The realistic collectible is the first Edinburgh edition (Edinburgh: printed for the Author, and sold by William Creech, 17 April 1787; Egerer 2; ESTC T125274; c. 3,000 copies; Beugo portrait frontispiece; subscribers' list; 22 poems new to the book), and it is genuinely collected in its own right as the first appearance of those poems. The census note's implication about the famous haggis variant is CORRECTED here: the first state is "skinking" (correctly set) at p. 263, and "stinking" is the LATER reading, introduced when William Smellie, short of type, reset and reprinted a large part of the sheets in a partial second impression. Two independent trade sources state the skinking setting precedes the stinking one, and Egerer himself was "inclined to believe" the skinking edition was printed first on comparison with the Kilmarnock text — Egerer's own hedge should be respected rather than overstated. A second corroborating first-state point in the Edinburgh edition is the misprint "Duke of Boxburgh" (for Roxburgh) in the subscribers' list. About 1,000 of the roughly 3,000 copies carry the stinking reading, and roughly 10% of copies mix sheets from both settings, so a copy can legitimately be part-first-state.