Finding date books were published

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

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?

There are a number of resources -- but it depends on the book. Quick
way to check is to try to match your book to one of the listings in the
online databases such as abebooks.com.

If it is an extremely well-known author or topic, chances are that
there is a printed bibliography out there that lovingly details all
editions of a particular title. Two of my favorite collecting areas
(Oz and Edgar Rice Burroughs) have literally dozens of books and
articles written about different editions.

One easy mistake that is made by new collectors and new dealers is
using the copyright date as the publication date. That date in
copyright page may or may not be the year that your particular book was
published, especially if the book is from the 19th or early 20th
century. For many American publishers, especially those who
specialized in reprinting works (Saalfield, Grosset, Triangle
Editions), that date had almost nothing to do with the date that they
printed the book and their own date of publication was rarely listed.

Collectors date these books upon a number of "clues" like
advertisements, cover art, etc. And that's where the various
bibliographies help.

Good luck,
Rosemary Jones
co-author, 3 volumes of Collector's Guide to Children's Books (now a
collectible as it is out-of-print!) and Boys & Girls Series Books.

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