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A is the first printing, B is the second. The lowest number on that line often indicates that book’s printing number.Ī variation on that theme is the letter row. With each printing, the publisher removes a number from the line of numbers.

In most cases, the first number on that number line indicates what printing that copy was a part of. A number line might show the printing and sometimes the year of publication. Publishers will often use one of a few methods for showing where that copy falls in the printing history of that book.

That page is usually on the verso of the title page. Typically, you will want to start with the copyright page as a first glance into a book’s lineage. The specifics of a identifying a particular book’s first printing often benefits from the use of reference books, but there are some basic things to look for. Each publisher has their own conventions for what they use to tell the first printing of their books, and to further complicate matters, they tend to periodically change what they’ve been doing from time to time. Professional booksellers and dedicated collectors spend time collecting knowledge and resources on what a particular publisher might use to identify the first printing of a book. Because most publishers aren’t typically in the business of trading in rare and collectible books, they haven’t necessarily had a strong reason for a unified and consistent way of identifying first editions. As those copies are shipped out to bookstores and sold, publishers will start a second printing to meet consumer demand. The first printing of a book might contain a few thousand copies. That first printing is just an installment on what they hope to be a long term investment in that book.

That’s because the first printing only represents a portion of the total number of copies of a book that the publisher hopes to sell. Edition and printing can be used fairly interchangeably in talking about collectible books, especially in regard to modern fiction.įor the most part, the first edition of a book is more meaningful to the world of book collectors than it was to the publisher who printed it.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, first edition means the first printing of a book.