Pre-original edition

Since the nineteenth century, a large part of French literature first appeared in the press: the serialised novel (roman-feuilleton) of Balzac, Sue and Dumas from 1836 onwards, then the reviews — the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Revue blanche, the Nouvelle Revue française — in which so many texts were read before existing as books. This first periodical publication is termed a pre-original edition (first publication in a periodical), and bibliographers — Vicaire, then Talvart and Place — recorded it with its date, its instalments and its title of the time, often different from the definitive title. Historians of the press have shown how much this passage through the newspaper shaped the texts themselves, cut into episodes and subject to the expectations of the subscribing reader.

For the bookseller, the pre-original is both a document and an object: the text is sometimes markedly different from the volume version — cut, censored or not yet reworked — and the review fascicule, the newspaper issue, or the bound set of instalments constitute an earlier state of the work. It is described as such, with its dates of publication and the number of instalments, and the completeness of the series is checked. Certain pre-originals are sought after in their own right, when the text in volume form was substantially rewritten or when the review has become rare.

The mistake is to present a pre-original as the first edition, or, conversely, to pass over in silence the fact that a text appeared in a review before the volume, which changes the import of the phrase "first edition". The pre-original is also sometimes confused with the offprint (tiré à part), copies of an article printed separately for the author from the review's typesetting, which sometimes constitute the true first separate edition of a text and are described under that name.