Finding date books were published

DS wrote:

>Hi everyone.
>I'm new to this whole book collecting thing. I notice that most
>people seem to be able to tell when books were published. If it
>indicates it on the inside, I can usually tell, but what if it
>doesn't? Can anyone steer me in the direction of any resources to
>find the date of publication? A lot of books don't have an ISBN so a
>lot of times that doesn't do me any good either.
>Any help would be appreciated.
>Thanks
>
>
>

A good starting point would be the ABBookman web site. There is a guide
there to identifying first editions from various publishers at various
points in time. Unfortunately, a couple of more user friendly sites
have ceased to exist. I will have to check at home to see if I saved
any of those web pages as PDF files. In any case, the 70 odd pages to
which I am referring you is JUST a starting point. You need to learn
about the peculiarities of various publishers, both in the past and even
now under the supposedly "uniform" number line system. (For instance,
there were publishers who indicated first printings by the presence of
their logo on the title page. No logo, not a first printing.)

Once you get the basics down, you can then start to get into the "points
of issue", whereby collectors distinguish various stages of a first
printing. For instance, the first state of a book may have a
misspelling on page 110, and they stopped the presses after a thousand
were printed and corrected the mistake and went on. Those first
thousand books are regarded as the "true" first printing. The
continuation of the first printing is designated "second state". There
are books out there that you can buy which will help you distinguish the
various "states" a book was published in.


Francis A. Miniter
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