THE FIRST EDITION AND ITS RECENT

REPRODUCTION.

O great was the demand for Burns's first venture in print that,

for ver a copy

The fact

procured for the household at Mossgiel, the whole impression (612 copies) having been exhausted in a few weeks. that within a period of seven weeks the recent reproduction of the volume, by D. Brown & Coy., Kilmarnock, has been completely sold out is a most pregnant proof of the enduring nature of the Poet's fame. When the issue was put on sale it soon became evident that double the number could have been disposed of without effort, so widespread was the desire to possess a correct fac simile of the unpretentious volume, which an eminent Glasgow bibliophile has described as bringing us nearer the personality of Burns than the sum total of all the editions which have succeeded. No pledge was given to the subscribers, nor were the copies numbered, and that for justifiable and sufficient reasons. The venture was a speculative one; the expense of a photogravure block for each page was a heavy outlay for a provincial firm; and the price asked was the minimum proportionate to the risk. It was, therefore, necessary to guard against loss by reserving the right to issue a second and cheaper edition should the contingency eventuate. Happily, the result has exceeded all expectation, and the writer is authorised by the publishers to announce publicly that the blocks are to be destroyed in accordance with the pledge given at the last annual meeting of the Burns Federation, under whose auspices the work was undertaken. Some three dozen copies have been reserved, we understand, for the orders of those

Colonial agents whose lists are not yet to hand, and for the few copies which have been sold in the home market since the month of October the published price has been doubled. The book is therefore likely to rise in value. The writer has, advisedly, refrained till now from all public reference to the volume, for reasons which are perhaps obvious enough; but he may be allowed to take this opportunity of stating that he had no pecuniary interest whatever in the venture, what he was enabled to do in connection therewith having been undertaken freely and willingly pro causae honore.

In the unanimous chorus of approval with which the volume has been received by all competent to judge some fears have been expressed that it will facilitate the malpractices of the forger and the faker, but such fears are entirely groundless. Apart from the wide difference between a type-struck and a block-struck leaf plainly perceptible by the unskilled eye, every page of the reproduction bears evidence of its origin on the face of it, which booklovers will very soon discover for themselves. The wire-lines of the paper are identical with those of the original, but the trademark-apparently a trefoil with the mid-leaf transformed into a conventional ornament—has not been reproduced, one of the reasons for the omission being that only small fragments of it appear on some thirty leaves of the original, and these almost obliterated by the folding of the sheet and the subsequent stitching. There were no bound copies in the original issue of the Kilmarnock edition, the account rendered by John Wilson to Robert Burns containing the informing and conclusive item, "Stitching 612 copies in Blue Paper at 1d-4 9s 3d." Nor was there any label on the back, as has been supposed by some commentators, who, however, condescend on no proof of their averments. So far as known to the writer only four copies have come down to us in the original wrappers-the Dundee, the Paisley, the Edinburgh, and the Kilmaurs copy-none of which bears a label on the back nor any vestiges of it, as the writer can testify from careful and repeated personal examination of all four.

The exact tint of the wrappers gave some trouble, the originals having faded and become intermixed with perplexing greens and browns, and it was also necessary in selecting the colour to make allowance for the changes wrought by Father Time. For the same reason the ink had to be toned down to a point which allowed sufficient margin for the mellowing influence of the years to come. The blocks also were a source of anxiety, many of them requiring the most delicate retouching, while several, including the title-page, had to be recast several times before satisfactory results were obtained. All things considered, it may be confidently asserted that the Kilmarnock reproduction is as near an approach to perfection as is possible at the present stage of the photogravure art.

The craftsmanship of John Wilson, as evidenced in the printing of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by the "obscure nameless Bard," has been frequently and justly praised. Like most work of the kind, however, it is far from being faultless. The minute examination of every word and letter which the preparation of Messrs Brown's reproduction demanded, revealed many slips of the compositor and not a few of the reader as well. The peculiarities of spelling characteristic of the Kilmarnock edition, which were subsequently corrected in the Edinburgh, need not here be commented on. But a few of the more notable slips may be given as a means of identifying the genuine volume and setting forth the difficulties in the way of a reliable reprint such as that issued by the late Mr M'Kie in 1867. As was to be expected in that work some of the errors of the old compositors have been corrected, perhaps unconsciously, by their modern brothers-in-trade, while others have been left untouched. We have selected fifty misprints from our notes which may be taken as typical examples. To the ordinary eye some of these may appear trivial, while our mention of others may be adjudged somewhat hypercritical. The misprints in the "Cotter's Saturday Night" (pp. 126, 136) have long been known to the cognoscenti, but there are a few more almost as glaring.

NOTE. The asterisk denotes that the error is corrected in the M'Kie reprint.

Some seventy misprints in all have been noted, consisting of turned letters, wrong fonts, mis-spacing, and a few additional slips of the kind indicated above. We have taken no notice of the present and past participles-" coman," "howkan,” “deny'd,” "ply'd," &c.—nor of the repeated "ay" for "aye,” which are characteristic of the Kilmarnock edition, though it will be found that the Poet repeatedly infringed his own rules on his first appearance in type. For the corrections in the M'Kie reprint it is almost certain that the compositor is responsible, the fruits of his craftsman instinct afterwards escaping the eye of the reader. The modern imitation type used in the reprint is narrower in face than the old, and consequently was capable of being packed more closely on the compositor's "stick." This might have been remedied in some degree by the use of the broader "quads apparently in use in Wilson's time, and a greater measure of coincidence in the length of the lines thereby secured. The initial capitals of the reprint, besides, are much too large, and the paper and binding are not in accordance with the original. It was these considerations which induced Mr M'Kie's lineal business successors to improve upon the reprint by replacing it by the photographic reproduction, which is not likely to be superseded