The article discusses the publication history of the poetic collection of the Hvar patrician Hanibal Lucić (1485–1553) first printed in Venice by Francesco Marcolini in 1556 under the title Skladanja izvrsnih pisan razlicih (Scladanya izvarsnich pisan razlicich). Through a detailed analysis of the first edition the author aims to shed light on the earlier manuscript circulation of different parts of the collection and to show that the order found in the first edition is more meaningful than the rearrangements introduced by modern editors from the nineteenth century onwards. Special attention is paid to the role of Francisko (Frano) Paladinić (Francesco Paladini) in promoting Lucić’s drama Robinja while still in manuscript and to the role of Antun Lucić, Hanibal’s illegitimate son, who commissioned the first edition and advertised the fact on the title page. It is established that between 1556 and 1638 Lucić’s poetic collection was printed in Venice in four different editions: 1556 (Francesco Marcolini), an undated edition published between 1556 and 1638 (Sigismondo Bordogna), 1585 (Ambrosio Mazolleto detto Garbin), 1638 (Marco Ginammi). The second edition, published between 1556 and 1585, was not previously known and is here described for the first time on the basis of the only surviving copy (Bibliothèque Mazarine, shelf-mark 8o 22153). Textual analysis of the second edition – which changes the title of the collection from Skladanja to Robinja – reveals that this edition predates both the 1585 and the 1638 edition, and that the later editions independently used the second edition as copy text. Without the second edition we would not be able to understand the history of Lucić’s text, especially because the third edition (1585) introduces numberless errors which completely disfigure Lucić’s poetry and are not found in the fourth edition (1638). It is further revealed that the second edition omits several poems and parts of poems, and inadvertently creates a new, nonsensical poem from the remaining bits. In this it is followed by the later editions. The article also revises the chronology of composition of Lucić’s works, showing that an oubreak of the plague on the island of Hvar in 1519 cannot be documented and that the traditional scholarly assumption that Lucić returned to his youthful compositions in 1519 must be abandoned. Instead, a somewhat later date is suggested.