Hi everyone, I’m currently going through my collection trying to make it a bit more curated & intentional. I’ve noticed a few of my books have numbers like “5”, “22”, “3” where the number line should be when looking at what editions I have. I can’t find any other number line in the book. Does anyone know what this would mean? 🤣 I’m an avid reader but only now getting into the collection side so any insight would be great!
Bill McBride’s A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions: Seventh Revised Edition came out in 2012. It looks like his last edition of Points of Issue: A Compendium of Points of Issue of Books by 19th-20th Century Authors was the third (1996).
If it's also from the country that the author lived in at the time, or if there was no simultaneous print run in his/her home country, then it's a True First.
Unless it's a new edition in a new exciting form like an Easton Press edition, in which case it's a "first edition thus".
And as long as it's not a book club edition (like BCA) replicating the actual first edition. You can often well because there's no price on the jacket of a 'book club' attribution is somewhere on the jacket or copyright page/back pages.
Also, book club editions often state as much on the dust jacket, frequently on the lower cover of the inside front flap - if that corner’s clipped, I always suspect it stated BCE; or sometimes they’ll state it on a copyright page; or they lack a complete ISBN barcode and/or price on the back of the dust jacket; or years ago, they might have added a blind or color stamped circle, square or other symbol on a bottom corner of the hardback cover itself; or they had paper boards instead of cloth; or they had perfect binding (like a paperback) inside the hard covers, instead of a stitched binding with a header strip.
To their credit(?), Book of the Month Club has started putting a bold “BOTM” logo at the top of their dust jacket spines, which saves me lots of time & trouble looking at a book that I would otherwise just re-shelve and keep going!
“Sometimes the publisher doesn't put the full line in.“
For example, Random House (pre-Penguin) would regularly start its number lines with “2” and go up from there, but a first printing would also state “First Edition.”
And after the first number line ran out, their second (or third, or fourth …) number line 1-9 would embed a letter (“B,” “C,” etc.).
You mention “numbers like … ‘22’.” If there’s also a full or partial 1-9 (or so) number line, the “22” may indicate the year of that printing. It’s easiest to recognize on some (much) later printings, where you might see something like “19 20 21 22 9 8 7 6,” which would indicate a 6th printing done in 2019. In my experience, publishers arrange any numbers like these such that they can easily drop off those that no longer apply - in my hypothetical above, they might drop off one (or more), starting with “19” and “6.”
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u/AkronIBM 1d ago
The book “First Editions: A Guide to Identification” by Zempel and published by Spoon River Press is what you want for an authoritative answer.