How to Tell the Printing Number of a Book

I recently saw a couple of copies of my books and realized that the Tattoo Encyclopedia is now in its 11th printing and Ink is in its 8th.  To find that out, I flipped open the front cover and found the printers key.

Of course, the printers key has a more descriptive name and one that will actually help you locate it:  the number line.  So, if you flip open your book, you’ll see the back of the cover to the left and the title page to the right.  Turn the title page over and you’ll then see the copyright page.  Somewhere on the copyright page you’ll find the number line, strangely resembling, of all things, a line of numbers.  The lowest number – they aren’t always in order – is the number of the printing.  As the number of printings goes up, the printers key gets shorter.  For the second printing, for example, the number “1” will disappear, but all else will remain the same.

Copyright Page

So, in the example above, taken from Rites of Passage by Van Gennep, there is a red box around the printers key.  This is the 13th printing of that book and it was printed in 1996.

If you’re thinking that the whole thing smacks of something archaic, you’d be right.  This is a system that was born sometime after World War II, but more than that, it harkens back to the time of the Linotype slug.

Many people theorize that the numbers disappear because that’s the most foolproof way of amending the copyright page.  You’re less likely to have an error if you’re just removing a number rather than trying to add one.  While true, there is also the physical reality of the mechanism that was used to print books, starting in the late 1800s.

The Linotype machine (“line of type” machine) did exactly as the name suggests.  It produced a single, solid, metal line of type.  Each word in the line was assembled by an operator, using individual metal block letters and spacers, and then the machine would actually use molten metal to weld these pieces together into one single piece from which a single line of a book (or pamphlet or magazine or what have you) could be printed.  It’s a process also known as hot metal printing.

The shrinking number line scheme, while also less likely to introduce errors, makes the least amount of work for the publisher.  Instead of creating a new Linotype slug for the number line, the last (or outer) number in the existing line (the lowest number) could be filed off and the slug used again.  It’s a wonderfully economic system.  But I can’t help but wonder how the digital era of book publishing will change it.  There is still the argument that it’s a method less prone to error, but what about the cost savings in ink when you stop printing all the numbers in the line and just print one?