Question about Charlotte's Web -- E.B. White

Hello all,

I was estate shopping today and came across an old copy of Charlotte's
Web by E.B. White. It has a dust jacket and seems to be in nice
shape. I could not tell if it was a first edition because "FIRST
EDITION" was not written on the copyright page. I know nothing about
book collecting, so I decided to look it up on ebay. I now know that
the first edition states "first edition". My copyright page seemed
different than the hi dollar ones AND the low dollar ones. So, I
looked up book collecting online. 8 hours later I write all of you
b/c I would like to know how to figure out if this book is special in
any way.

Here's what's different: The true first has copyright information
immediately followed by, "FIRST EDITION" and below "FIRST EDITION" is
"X-X" (can't read the number/letter on the pic). The Library of
Congress info is at the bottom of the page, separated from the
copyright information. The cheaper ones seem to have the copyright
info and LOC info in one big paragraph and no "X-X".

My edition does not have "FIRST EDITION" on its copyright page. It
has the copyright information at the top followed immediately by
"K-G", and the Libarary of Congress information is at the bottom.

Ugh!!!!! I would be very grateful if someone told me what this
means and how I may do research this myself in the future.

Thanks!

Micky

Micky wrote:

I would be very grateful if someone told me what this
means and how I may do research this myself in the future.

People will generally be able to help you better if you said who the
publisher was (Harper and Brothers). They had a complicated system, whereby
the first letter stands for the month and the second letter stands for the
year. The true first should have I-B, the I standing for September, and the
B for 1952. Your copy, with K-G, was published in October, 1957.

To do this kind of thing yourself you need some reference tools. Ahearn,
Book Collecting, has an appendix of different publishers' methods of
indicating the first edition/printing, and is a useful starting-point for
finding out about the subject. You can often get a lot of information by
reading sellers' descriptions on sites like ABE
(http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch).

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

John,

Thanks for your help. Tried to write you directly (at
) but it bounced. Here's what I wrote:

Hi John,

Thanks for your response to my post. I buy and sell regularly on
Ebay. I caught the book collecting bug when I made a $90 profit for
some books I bought on a lark two weeks ago. I paid $1.50 for them.

In that time I've been gobbling up as much information as I can
online. I now would like to purchase a couple of books to help
solidify my knowledge. Any other suggestions and/or comments on my
choices? Thanks in advance!

I am looking at purchasing the following:

"Modern Book Collecting" by Robert Wilson
"Book Finds" by Ian Ellis
The two McBride books on first editions.