Someone else’s book question prompted mine.
What is the purpose of the numbers 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 on the copyright and publishing information page of books?
The book I have with me today has 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7.
Does it have anything to do with the type face?
It shows what printing the book is.
The first printing has all the numbers, then they take one off with each new printing. So if it says “10 9 8 7 6 5 4” then it is the fourth printing. The book example you give was the 7th printing.
(See for example here: Big Java Errata )
I’ve noticed some books, which presumably expect to get through lots of printings, have something like
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13 11 9 7 5 3 1
… or it might have been
20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19
and then a number gets removed from either end alternately… so I guess it was the first one.
The lowest number indicates what printing it is, so in your example it’s the seventh printing.
I have no idea why they do it that way, though.
Not sure. You’d think if they were changing it anyway, it would be just as easy to change “First printing” to “Second printing”.
My guess is that back in the days of movable type, it was easier to set up the page with all the numbers then just pull one digit out of the printing plate each time.
I don’t really have a good idea of why they do it that way either, but it probably has something to do with the way typeface was done. But now, it’s probably done with word processing, so I don’t see why they don’t just type in “7th Printing,” for something like that.
It definitely dates from the days of lead typesetting. It was cheaper and simpler to scratch off a number on the plate instead of casting a new one.
It also worked nicely with phototypsetting – you scraped off the number with an X-acto knife.
Since most books are still typeset (much cheaper than laser printing for long runs), it continues.
Thanks! Now I can feel like the wise chick in the bookstore and say, “ah…the third printing of an exceptional book.” (smile)
So fast you guys! Than you.
IIRC, that’s pretty much it. If you’re using a Linotype press and you want to augment the printing number, you just chisel the lowest number off of the appropriate slug. Using something like “First Printing”, “Second Printing”, etc. would require you to cast an entirely new slug (line) for each printing.
Now that the question is answered:
Cite? Not that I doubt that you know what you’re talking about, but you can’t possibly mean people still manually set type like they did with the old lead type. 
I just happened to look at the one book near me right now: Linear Algebra - Third Edition by Serge Lang (Springer-Verlag, 1987). I think one must be careful not to confuse editions with printings here - the first and second editions are effectively different books, right? It sure seems that way after reading this paragraph on the copyright page:
But I’m digressing more than a bit. For the third edition, the relevant line to this thread reads as follows:
Sounds to me like this is the 3rd printing of the 3rd edition, and some mistakes in the 2nd printing were fixed for this one. But that line looks odd - doesn’t it defeat the entire purpose of using the numbers, then, to go ahead and write it out on the latter half of the same line?
Just happened to find a Wiki article - apparently the industry term for the line of numbers is printers key, although you’ll also see it referred to as the number line.
Now this confuses me. Printers didn’t really keep around the old plates of their books did they? I can imagine keeping the copyright page around for various reasons, but certainly not the whole book? The storage costs, having to buy new metal, etc., would add up quickly.
But if you thought it would go into a second (or more) printing, you’d have to reset and reproof the book before you could print it again - so hanging on to the metal seems cheaper (you can probably recyle it a year later or something).
No. Most books are produced by photo offset printing. More similar to, but still a different process than, laser printing.
brad_d, you’re correct in that printings and editions must be distinguished and you’d be amazed at how many people I find in the book business who still can’t the two straight.
The first printing and the first edition of a book are identical, so many people use them interchangeably. The confusion sets in immediately thereafter.
Publishers are inconsistent in naming the changes they make to an already printed volume. A first printing may be planned to be a certain size, but not physically printed up all at once. This often leads to mistakes being found and corrected before all the scheduled books were done. A corrected first edition may very well still be labeled a first edition and be otherwise identical. The corrections are known as “points” in the trade. Any used and rare book catalog or bibliography worthy of the name will list points for first editions by famous authors. Collectors normally prize the “true” first edition more, even if more of that version was actually printed. Other collectors try to collect all variants. Other books waited until the second printing to make the changes. Some notoriously difficult to typeset books like *Ulysses *changed with every printing.
Covers were easier to change than the text of books, so its common to find first editions with several variant covers on them. For example, Gnome Press, one of the earliest science fiction specialty hardback publishers, almost never could afford to print all of a first edition at once. It also had a policy of listing its other books on the back cover. You can trace the evolution of the printing by which new books were added to the back cover. Some of Asimov’s Foundation books have four variant covers known. Gnome also used different colors, lettering, and materials - presumably whatever they had handy or could buy the cheapest - for the hard covers when they brought a book back to print. Four completely different versions of these are also known for Asimov’s books.
Even so, finding an actual Gnome Press book marked “second printing” is almost impossible. For whatever reason, they didn’t operate that way.
Some publishers did the reverse. On many older books you can find a notation like “second printing (before publication)”. That’s because so many orders were received from bookstores, which order from publishers’ catalogs and salespeople before the book is printed, that the first scheduled printing wasn’t sufficient. Why didn’t they just increase the number of the first edition? Probably because it’s good hype for a book to proclaim that so many people demanded it that the publisher couldn’t keep up.
What distinguishes an edition from a printing? There’s no formal definition. Almost always, though, an edition has more changes made to it than a printing. The changes are not necessarily made to the text. A new introduction, author’s note, scholarly analysis, appended chapter, added index, or other “apparatus” could define a new edition. New editions and revised editions are therefore not necessarily the same thing.
To makes things even more fun, there are times when a book is revised and put out under a new title and a new first printing.
The only answer to “why?” is that there have been tens of thousands of publishers over the years, many of them small, hastily put together, run by cranks or purists, or just indifferent to what everybody else does, except perhaps when they want to be deliberately different from everybody else.
Most serious used book collectors will carry with them a booklet like Bill McBride’s Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions, which lists around 1500 publishers and assigns a code to each showing the method they use for signaling a first printing. There are over 20 different codes. Some publishers used different codes at different times; some used more than one code, some were purely and simply inconsistent. And some didn’t bother at all.
Fortunately, most serious used book collectors are crazy even before they get into the game, because they surely would become so very quickly otherwise.
Yeah, but it was still far, far cheaper than the labor of redoing an entire book, not to mention the time needed, the disruption to schedules, the need to do all the rounds of proofreading all over again, and everything else that goes into printing a book.
Just for the record, a Linotype is not a press, but a slugcaster. You’d then take those slugs and print from them on a press. But even more likely, you’d take the slugs and make a stereotype or an electrotype from them and print from that. The slugs could then be remelted and the much lighter, thinner stereotype would be left as standing material for later reprints.
So says the guy with a Linotype in his garage.
My question would be, what point and purpose is there listing which printing a book is anyway? Is it just done for collectors?
See the above question about a corrected error. If you know a book had an error in it’s first three printings and you wanted to read it without getting the error, you’d want to check to make sure it was a later printing than that.
Also just to be clear, nobody does this anymore.
Way back in the Dark Ages when I was a litho stripper (early 90s), many was the time I prepped a reprint job by simply pulling the appropriate film flat and taping out the appropriate print code. (Another reason why the low numbers are on the outside: the width of your tape didn’t matter.)
When printing with linotype you have a single block for the whole page or pages. They would just file down one number for each printing. Otherwise you’d have to redo the entire block.