How to Identify a First Edition, from Popula

You'll also find that book club editions are commonly marked with a blind stamp--that's a small embossed dot or square or other recessed mark on the lower right corner of the back cover. There are a few exceptions to this (as usual!). No blind stamp here … excellent.

(Personally, I find book club editions make great reading copies, and you don't have to feel so guilty when you bring them into the bathtub.)

It's a good bet that this is, in fact, a genuine first edition!! Worth, according to comparisons from the various search services such as the highly recommended Bookfinder.com and Advanced Book Exchange, around $15-$20 in this condition.

The best way to learn how to identify first editions is to handle a lot of books with a view to learning how to do so. There are several excellent basic books commonly used by experts, notably: Collected Books : The Guide to Values by Allen Ahearn and Patricia Ahearn; First Editions : A Guide to Identification by Zempel and Verkler, and the Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions by Bill McBride, a portable reference. Also recommended: the mystery series by John Dunning, including Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake. These feature the detective Cliff Janeway, a book dealer whose descriptions of book collecting are fun to read and full of useful details.

Beginning collectors, note well, a vast percentage of the books for sale on the Internet are wrongly described. Careful study will reveal that many, many dealers, in some cases more than half the dealers describing a given title, have not bothered to figure out what the earliest printing was, but instead merely pop the magic words "first edition" into their listings, either out of unwarranted optimism or mere laziness--or in an attempt to defraud a credulous public. Should collectors do the necessary homework, it will no longer pay these lazy bums to be so sloppy. Thank you for reading Popula's primer on book collecting; please stay tuned for more articles of interest.