First Edition:

POEMS / by / Dante Gabriel Rossetti. / London: / F. S. Ellis, 33 King Street, Covent Garden. / 1870. Crown 8vo. [A]6 B–I8 K–S8 T4 U2pp. [i–vii] viii–xi [xii] [1] 2–282; 1 leaf noting Strangeways imprint. Two additional leaves at the end advertise ‘F. S. Ellis Publications’. This material is followed by a blank gathering to fill out the binding which had been cut wrong.

1000 copies were issued 26 April, the edition selling out rapidly;

on 30 April, DGR wrote Ellis:

On 3 May, DGR reported to F. M. Brown:

By 22 May, the first edition was sold out, and the second issue of 1000 (second, third and fourth editions) was in print. DGR was finally satisfied with the binding on the new issue (WEF 70.163–64 & 166–67).

Variants:

WMR noted that ‘a few copies, preceding the completed binding, were issued in a quite plain cloth binding’ (Bibliography 19). This first bound state of the book is a pre-publication issue of 14 April in plain blue cloth necessitated by delays in the decorated binding designed by DGR, who wanted bound copies in the hands of the reviewers well before official publication. A copy of this state in the Sterling Library at Yale has plain grayish-white endpapers, but some copies of it exist stamped with the woodcut decorations used on the endpapers through editions 1–6. The text and pagination of this state is identical with the first edition, but there are no advertising leaves tipped in.