A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

Scottish original and the only edition that counts as the first: Blackwood, Edinburgh and London, 1926. There was no contemporaneous American or London-trade edition. The first US publication came decades later — an annotated edition from the University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1971 — which is a 'first thus', as are the later Scottish reprints (the 200 Burns Club, Edinburgh, 1956; Caledonian Press; Castle Wynd Printers) and the Scottish Academic Press annotated texts. Sales of the 1926 sheets were poor by MacDiarmid's own account and copies were pulped, which is why the first is scarce and why later reset texts dominate the market.