The first edition of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in London on November 24, 1859; after deducting author’s review and legal deposit copies from the edition of 1,250 copies, all remaining 1,170 copies were taken up by booksellers on that same day. A second London edition with slight revisions appeared on January 6, 1860. The first US edition, based on the London first, was published in the middle of June 1860. The first German edition appeared in 1860, and the third London edition was published in April 1861. Six editions in all—1859, 1860, 1861, 1866, 1869 and 1872—were published by John Murray in London and variously revised by Darwin himself. Morse Peckham, who produced a variorum edition of the Origin, wrote “… the sixth edition is nearly a third as long again as the first.”
It’s weird when you think about it, but I’ve read the bible and I’d put it right up there with Aesop’s fables (Ok I like the Christ vs Romans bit but the god angle really spoils the Gandhi-Biko-King paradigm) but I’ve never read the “Origin of the Species”. Its right there on the shelf! I’ve read other books which reference it, but never the book itself. Talk bout awe or what?
