Bibliography Styles Handbook     

MLA Format: Specific edition of a book in a bibliography

An edition refers to a work which has been prepared for publication by an editor or some person other than the author. A typical bibliography entry for an edition inserts the editor's name after the title of the book as in the following:

Yeats. W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1989.


An edition may also refer to later or revised editions of a book. In such a case, place the edition number or "Rev. ed." (for "revised edition") after the title of the book as in the following:

Newbold, Paul. Statistics for Business and Economics. 3rd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1990.


If no edition number appears on the title page, it is probably a first edition and therefore, you do not need to indicate the edition number in your bibliography.