First Edition:

Ballads and Sonnets/ by / Dante Gabriel Rossetti. / London: /Ellis and White, / 29, New Bond Street, W. / 1881. Crown 8vo. [A6+1] B–I8 K–L8 M8+1 N–U8 X Y8 pp. [i–iv] [2] [v]–xii [1–3] 4–159 [160] [2] [161–63] 164–335 [336] 1 leaf at the end advertises, recto, DGR's Poems: New and Dante and His Circle [EIP reissued] The dedication to TWD, tipped in after the title-page, and the divisional title for HL, tipped in before Sig. M, are both unnumbered cancel leaves. Pp. 185–86 are also a cancel-leaf but do not disrupt numbering sequence.

Binding was the same as that for Poems, again signed ‘De Lacy’. Lettering on the spine reads:

Ballads and Sonnets D. G. Rossetti

Variants:

WMR states that thirty copies were printed on large paper (Bibliography No. 24) but the Certificate of Issue in these copies, which appears centered on the verso of the half-title (blank in regular copies), reads: ‘Twenty-five Copies printed on large paper for Subscribers only.’ This issue is printed on Whatman's hand-made paper, demy octavo, bound in blue-grey paper-covered boardsbacked with white, with white paper back-label, lettered ‘Ballads / and / Sonnets / By / D. G. Rossetti’. Some copies have the goldstamped De Lacy binding but plain white endpapers. The Ellis advertisement appears at the end. Page 238 is misprinted 38; in regular copies this page is correctly numbered. On p. 180, line 14 of Sonnet 18, Genius in Beauty, has the fourth edition reading. Collation details otherwise agree with the first edition.