Robert Heinlein’s 1941 serial “Methuselah’s Children” was put into book form by Gnome Press in 1958. The volume is a bibliographer’s nightmare. There are at least four different colors of the boards and the publisher changed its address on the back cover part-way through. Nobody knows the order of the colors or whether the later ones were new bindings of the original printed pages or a second edition reprinted from the plates.
I just found a clue that no one has ever mentioned. John W. Campbell had printed a chart of Heinlein’s “Future History” earlier that year, listing the stories he had written and planned to write, and putting them in a chronological and social context. It was a sensation. No one had ever explicitly planned out a future like this and announced it publicly.
Gnome reprinted the chart on the front and rear endpapers of all of the variants. Except one. The extremely rare green boards variant that I recently found after many years of searching lacks the chart on its rear endpapers.
This means something! What, exactly, I don’t know. Endpapers are, by definition, the pages pasted to the inside of the boards. How could otherwise identical internal pages have a blank page pasted in instead of a printed one? Does that mean this was a brand-new printing? Could a plate have simply gone missing? Something else entirely?
I should know this, but somehow I’ve never given a thought to endpapers and how they got there. Any experts in book production out there?