James's preliminary ideas for The Sacred Fount were recorded in the third volume of his notebooks on 17/18 February 1894, and in the sixth volume of his notebooks on 15 February 1899 and 16 May 1899 (see CN 88, 176, 184). The three typescript copies of The Sacred Fount, two of which were sent by James to Pinker on 25 and 26 July 1901, do not seem to have been preserved. There was no periodical version of the novel. The first UK edition of The Sacred Fount (here SFM) was published by Methuen and Company on or about 15 February 1901. James chose not to republish The Sacred Fount in The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907–9) and did not directly discuss the novel in his Prefaces to that edition. The only other edition of the novel to be issued during James's lifetime was the first US edition (here SFS) published by Charles Scribner's Sons on or about 8 February 1901.

Compared to novels such as The Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, where a first periodical version as well as a New York Edition text exists, the situation in the case of The Sacred Fount is straightforward. The copy text adopted in this edition is SFM rather than SFS. It is true that SFS was published a few days before SFM but this does not accord it priority in any meaningful sense: SFM is not a ‘descendant’ of SFS. On 15 October 1900, James Brand Pinker did suggest to Scribner's that Methuen ‘may like to take plates of your edition’. Yet this did not happen: the Methuen text consisted of 316 pages and the Scribner text of 319 pages. In this as in other cases, therefore, CFHJ policy is to adopt the first British edition as the copy text. Moreover, a comparison of SFM and SFS reveals that the former text is in general more reliable than the latter (see the Textual Variants).

In at least one case, an unusual binding error was made during the production of SFM. The present editor possesses a copy (once the property of Mudie's Select Library and Benn's Circulating Library) in which pages 257–72 are missing, having been replaced with a duplicate of pages 65–80.