Do you have a First Edition or Early Printing?

This question crosses my mind frequently when searching for books.  I mean, it is an investment when you put your money into a book.  Okay, the big investment is your child reading the book and gaining knowledge and smarts from it.  Of course.  That's the ultimate goal.  But you are still curious and hoping that one day you will come across that one book that will make you money; that's worth more than the $1.00 that you are putting down for it.

So how do you tell if you have a first edition or if you have a first printing?  or both?

During these present days, it's much easier to tell a first edition or first printing.  Why?  Because they actually tell you in the book.  Take for example Hyperion Books (who publishes the Pigeon books by Mo Willems):

As you can see, this is a First Edition.  It plainly states it above the number line.  This means that this is the original book.  There have been no updates, no change of publishers, no change in the covers, no changes to the pages....nothing.  That's what makes it a first edition.

So let's talk about the number line.  It's weird....it doesn't even go in order.  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2  So what's this line about?  It's the printing line.  This tells you if it's a first printing, second printing, third printing, etc.  If it's a first printing, that means it was one of the first books from the publisher.  Second printing means it was one of the books from the second time the publisher issued another printing of the book.  They basically say, "okay, let's print some more"  then they will issue another printing which would be the third printing and so on.

So just look in your number line.  If you have a number one still in the line, it's a first printing.  Just like you see above.  Which is awesome.

Now here is another book printed by the publishers Dutton.  The number line isn't messed up like you saw above but they both mean the same thing.  In this one you can see that the number one is missing from the line and so the lowest number is 2.  This means that it's a First Edition, Second printing.  Not as great as the first printing, but it's still an early printing which makes it nice.

Here's another example of the copyright page from Scholastic:

As you can see to the left, it has a number line, too.  This lowest number is two which makes it a 2nd printing.  But there's another number line to the right.  This line tells you the year it was published.  The line says 10 11 12 13 14 15/0.  The number after the slash (0) indicates it was printing in the 2000s.  The lowest number before the 0 tells you which year.  So the lowest number 10, which means it was published in 2010.  Confusing?  Well, let's try this one.  A year line says this:   7 8 9/8   0 1 2 3/9    This one has two slashes, so this one is a bit more confusing.  But as with all copyright lines, you go with the lowest number.  So the lowest number after a slash is 8.  Then the lowest number on 8's line is 7.  So that book would have been printed in 1987.  They have the additional line with the /9 because it's almost to the 1990s.  So they need it there for when it switches decades.

Plus, Scholastic is nice and tells you when the first scholastic edition was, which was in September of 2010.

They started using number books, I believe, around the 70s.  So what about before then?  Well, that depends solely on the publisher and how they decided to tell you (and some even didn't tell you).  So to tell you, I will have to make individual posts for each publisher as I get to them.  Really, that's the only way since there are SOOOOO many publishers out there.  But hopefully this helps for anything slightly vintage to newer.