Lyrical Ballads

English is the original language and 1798 is the true first year; the precedence question here is between two title-page issues of one edition, not between countries. First issue: the Bristol/Longman imprint above. Cottle had prepared the title with T. N. Longman's imprint but he and Longman reached no agreement, and within about a fortnight Cottle sold the whole edition of 500 copies — less the few already distributed — to J. and A. Arch of London, who cancelled the title leaf and substituted their own: "London: Printed for J. & A. Arch, Gracechurch-Street. 1798". The book was published in London on 4 October 1798. The Bristol-imprint first issue is the pinnacle and is effectively unobtainable: Sotheby's records that copies of the first issue are notoriously rare and that none are thought to remain in private hands, which makes the Arch (second) issue the earliest form realistically collected — and it is genuinely collected, not a consolation. Both should be named. Precedence of the two imprints has been argued over by Thomas J. Wise, D. F. Foxon, Robert W. Daniel, and James A. Butler and Karen Green, and Foxon in particular speculated about the abnormal "Printed by Biggs and Cottle for T. N. Longman" imprint; the Bristol-first ordering given here is the standard trade and auction position, but a cataloguer should cite the scholarship rather than assert it flatly.