
What's the row of numbers on the copyright page of books? - raganwald
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/10/2065727.aspx
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firebones
This is a carryover from when printing presses used actual plates. The initial
edition would carry all numbers from 1 to whatever. When the second edition
would be printed, the printer would simply erase the last number (the 1) from
the plate, indicating that the lowest number was the current printing run.

I used to work in a small town press and the local paper would employ the same
idea for its editions. The first run, which I would deliver to the stores, was
the two-star edition. After the first batch was done, the printer would go to
the platen, erase one of the stars, and start the press run for the snail mail
edition that would ship later to the customers who received copies by mail.

(edit: whoops, failed to read OP...but leaving here for the small press
newspaper reference. Printers are interesting cats. You shall know them by
their missing digits. No, not the numbers in the editionsm but the missing
fingers lost between the rolling plates.)

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andyjohnson0
If printing presses no longer use plates, what do they use now?

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nhebb
I grabbed the nearest book and tried to find this page. By fate it was
_JavaScript: The Good Parts_. The page only lists the following:

    
    
      Printing History:
      May 2008:    First Edition.
    

(Shakes fist) Damn you O'Reilly for making it so explicit. Next time, I want a
puzzle!

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waqf
"First edition" ≠ "first printing".

The edition number is always explicit, because for a new edition the pages are
re-set. For a new printing the pages are (traditionally) not re-set, which is
why the printing number has to be encoded in some manually-updatable way.

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MaxGabriel
Can anyone confirm/deny Grouse's comment from the article?

"It's unlikely that a single set of metal plates would survive multiple
printings. They wear out pretty fast. Instead, this would be used on the film
negative used to expose the photosensitive plates. Of course, now people are
printing directly to the plates instead, skipping the film step."
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/10/20657...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/10/2065727.aspx#2076349)

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leif
For xerographic (and other chemical process) prints, what you say is probably
true. For relief printing (think Gutenberg), this convention seems reasonable,
though you'd have to grind, not scratch, away the extra number. I don't know
enough book history to say whether this convention is old enough to have
started from relief printing, but that's the only way it makes sense to me.

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drivebyacct2
Seems insecure. I can just add ["3 2 1"] to make mine look like a first
generation book, no?

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rollypolly
It's not meant to be secure. But you can also identify a printing by its typos
and corrections.

