163 - Kipling (Rudyard) Schoolboy Lyrics, first edition [one of approximately 50 copies], original brown printed wrappers, browning and chipping to spine ends, 19mm. split to foot of upper joint, very light corner creasing but a very good copy generally, preserved in custom brown morocco gilt pull-top slip-case (extremities rubbed), [Stewart 1; Grolier 15; Martindell 1], 8vo, Lahore, Printed at the "Civil and Military Gazette" Press, 1881.

Kipling (Rudyard) Schoolboy Lyrics, first edition [one of approximately 50 copies], original brown printed wrappers, browning and chipping to spine ends, 19mm. split to foot of upper joint, very light corner creasing but a very good copy generally, preserved in custom brown morocco gilt pull-top slip-case (extremities rubbed), [Stewart 1; Grolier 15; Martindell 1], 8vo, Lahore, Printed at the "Civil and Military Gazette" Press, 1881. *** Kipling's rare first book, comprising twenty-three poems printed by his parents for private circulation without Kipling's knowledge whilst he was at college in England: "Though it was produced without Kipling's knowledge, and though he was embarrassed by it then and afterwards, the book is technically Kipling's first and is now one of the rarissima in his bibliography" (Thomas Pinney, ODNB ). The total number of copies produced is believed to be around fifty, comprising two issues of approximately twenty-five copies each, one issue in white paper and the other in brown paper. It was believed for some time that the white wrappers indicated the true first issue, and that the brown-wrappered issue was trimmed down, but current theory suggests that this was not consistently the case and that the brown wrappers may have come first.