Issue points, impressions and states
A first edition is the whole of the first printing from one setting of type. A first impression is the first run off the press within that edition. A state is a change made during a print run — a corrected misprint, a re-cut plate — and an issue is a deliberate re-presentation, such as sheets rebound for a new market. Dealers use the words loosely. Catalogues do not.
| Term | What it means | What it does to price |
|---|---|---|
| First edition, first impression | First setting, first print run | The reference point for everything else |
| First edition, later impression | Same setting, reprinted | Commonly a tenth or less |
| First state | Earliest form within the run, usually with an error | Premium where the error is famous |
| Second issue | Sheets re-presented, often a new title page or binding | Usually below first issue, occasionally above |
| Book club edition | Separate setting or run for a club | Rarely collectable; often mistaken for a first |
Four traps
- “First published 1948” on the verso. That is a publication statement, not an impression statement. Look for a number line or the absence of any later date.
- A number line that starts at 2. The lowest number present is the impression. A line reading 2 3 4 5 is a second.
- Right book, wrong jacket. Jackets are swapped between copies more often than anyone admits, and on twentieth-century books the jacket can be most of the value.
- Australian and British issues of the same title. Sheets shipped and bound locally are a different issue, and which one is “the first” depends on the publication dates, not on where you happen to live.
Provenance
Provenance is evidence of ownership, and it runs backwards from you: the most recent owner leaves the clearest trace. A bookplate is not proof that its owner was the first — plates are pasted over plates, and a nineteenth-century plate in a seventeenth-century book tells you about 1870, not 1660.
What is worth recording when you buy: the seller, the date, the price paid, and a photograph of every inscription and plate before you do anything else. Most of the provenance lost from private collections is lost at the moment of purchase, not decades later.
Choosing a field
The commonest mistake in collecting is a field with no edge: “Australian literature” has no end, and a collection with no end is a shelf of unrelated books. A field wants three properties: a boundary you can state in a sentence, enough material that something appears twice a year, and few enough competitors that prices are set by scarcity rather than by fashion.
The best collections I have catalogued were assembled by people who could say what did not belong in them.
Collecting on a small budget
Two hundred dollars a month is a serious collecting budget if it is spent narrowly. It is nothing at all if it is spread across everything that catches the eye at a fair.
- Buy the best copy you can afford of the least fashionable thing in your field.
- Condition costs more than rarity in the twentieth century, and less than rarity before 1800.
- Ex-library copies are cheap for reasons that do not matter in some fields and matter enormously in others. Know which yours is.
- Set aside a quarter of the budget for the year’s one unrepeatable thing, and leave it unspent for months.
Buying from a stack
Ninety seconds, in this order: spine and hinges for cracking, title page for edition, the gutter of a few random openings for damp lines, fore-edge for spotting, and finally the rear board for the bookseller’s pencil. If the price is in ink, someone once thought it was worth marking permanently.