The term designates, in an edition whose print run is described by a justification, the first copies on the list, those which the publisher intended to be the finest: luxury paper, often Japan or China paper, the lowest numbering, sometimes a suite of the illustrations, an original drawing, a signature of the author or the artist. The practice arose in the nineteenth century with illustrated editions and bibliophile societies, and became widespread between the two world wars, when every literary publisher had its own hierarchy of papers.
The bookseller first reads the justification, which states how many copies make up the head of the print run and what they contain, then checks that the copy in hand indeed bears everything announced: the number, the paper, the complete suite, the signature. The value of a limited deluxe edition lies in its place within this hierarchy, in its actual figure and in its integrity; a copy from which the suite is missing, or from which a drawing has been detached, is no longer what it claims to be.
Confusions abound. The limited deluxe edition is not the large-paper issue as a whole: it is its uppermost point. Copies marked hors commerce or H.C., or lettered, reserved for the author and collaborators, do not always belong to it, even when printed on the same paper. Overrun copies (exemplaires de passe), surplus and unjustified, are excluded from it by definition. And a signature added after the fact by the author on an ordinary copy does not make it a copy of the head of the print run.
