Darwin Online: On the Origin of Species

Darwin Online: On the Origin of Species

 This, certainly the most important biological book ever written, has received detailed bibliographical treatment in Morse Peckham's variorum edition, 1959. The first edition also has a full bibliographic description in H. D. Horblit One hundred books famous in science, 1964, Grolier Club. Peckham considers all editions and issues published in England of which he was aware, from the first of 1859 up to the thirty-ninth thousand of 1890. His work includes consideration of paper, type and bindings, as well as giving summaries of John Murray's accounts for each printing. The bibliography is an adjunct to the variorum text which shows the great changes which Darwin made to the five editions which follow the first. The author's minor changes in the printing of 1876, which seem to have been ignored by all subsequent editors and even by the publisher's themselves, are brought to light, although Peckham was only able to see the issue of 1878.

[The title page and facing quotations of a first edition of Origin of species on loan to Christ's College, Cambridge. Photograph: John van Wyhe.]