The Faerie Queene

No book-club issue exists for a 1590 quarto. The realistic confusions are the 1596 quarto (second edition of Books I–III), the 1609 and 1611/1612–13 Lownes folios, the many 18th- and 19th-century editions (Hughes 1715, Todd 1805, the Victorian illustrated sets), and modern facsimiles and scholarly editions. Because the poem was reprinted continuously, the safest screen is the imprint and date: only a 1590 Ponsonby quarto with the date-under-'r' imprint and the Pp/Qq sonnet state can be the first of Books I–III, and only a 1596 Ponsonby quarto can be the first of Books IV–VI.