October Question of the Month: An irregular series

The reference librarians at Seattle Public Library are pretty darn amazing. They don’t know everything, instead they know where to find everything. As part of an irregular series of posts we salute the talented and dedicated reference staff at your local library. Names and other identifying information have been removed from the questions we showcase. Got a stumper? Click on Ask a Librarian. It’s what we do.

“What do the numbers on the bottom of the copyright page mean?”

A Google search for “numbers on the copyright page” (in quotes) led to a variety of sources including a blog called “Ask Dave Taylor” where the blog author answered this type of question by calling 2 friends in the publishing industry and a Q&A page from the Chicago Manual of Style Online.

The numbers at the bottom of the copyright page indicate which printing of a book you are holding. The smallest number to appear in that line is the number of the printing you have.

Here is an example:

Published in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4

A book with this string of numbers on its copyright page would be from the fourth printing of the title.

The numbers appear to be a holdover from the days of mechanical printing presses, when the printer would go through the time and labor-intensive process of creating a metal master plate for each page of the book. Knowing that additional printing runs might be needed if the book were popular, but wishing to avoid recreating the copyright page plate for each successive printing, the printers included a line of numbers at the bottom of the page that could be altered with minimal effort.  When the printer prepared to make a second printing of the book, he just scraped off the lowest number and used the same again.

Things threaten to get a little bit confusing here because a “printing” of a book and an “edition” of a book are not the same thing. A “printing” is an episode of running paper through the press to produce new copies of a book. An “edition” is a new version of a book, which may include changes to the text as well as the variations in ink and so forth caused by a new run through the press. So you might be holding the fourth printing of the third edition of the title, for example, and that string of numbers often only tells you which printing you have of a given edition, not which edition it is.

Totally confused? Here are a couple of websites that talk about these numbers and their history in more detail, as well as how to deduce which edition you’re holding.

Editions and Printings, How to Tell the Difference: a guide for book collectors, by Michael Sauers

First Edition Identification by Publisher, by Quill and Brush