The Jargon of Bookmongering
by Bill Johns

Have you ever seen an ad like this and thought it must be written in Romulan or Sanskrit?

Einstein, George. The Home Manufacture of Cosmoplastic Antimatter. Positron Press, Boston, 1933. A nice copy of an important book on the amateur production of antimatter. 1st edition, second state, with 2 of 3 points. Presentation copy, inscribed and signed by author. Loose signatures, boards shaken and moused, crayoned marginal notes, scuffed and rubbed. In a fair dw, chipped and sunned. 756pp, 8vo. g/fr. Overall good. $125.

Welcome to the arcane language of book dealing. To the true collector of books, condition is more important than content. This has led book sellers to develop elaborate terminology to describe almost any possible defect. And there`s a surprising degree of consensus on what the terms mean.

Let`s dissect the description above. The initial entries are fairly self-evident. They`re included to allow general identification of the book so potential buyers know what they`re looking at. Then we get a statement of why this book is important enough to include in the booksellers catalog and why potential buyers should add it to their library. Here the seller - usually a frustrated novelist - can get creative. It may be a simple statement or it may become a mini-essay on the significance of anti-matter production during the great depression, placing the manufacturing in its social, political, and economic context.

Then we get down to the details. Even more important to the true book collector than condition, is priority. Book collectors want the earliest possible version of the book. Serious Book Collectors don`t care about accuracy or authors intent - they want the first book off the presses. Collectors, over the years, have identified the errors and corrections that occurred in important books. These errors are called points. When the publisher sends the book to press for the first time there are invariably small errors in the printing plates. You never find them until the presses are running and the finished copies are spewing out. Then it`s discovered that there`s an omitted word on page 118, a missing comma on page 245, and the formula for building the anti-matter containment vessel on page 347 is missing a part of the energy equation (a fatal flaw that will cause the containment vessel to implode, wiping out most of Manhattan.) Serious book collectors live for these errors - not because they plan to build a containment vessel but because they know that the publisher stopped the presses, corrected the comma, added the omitted word, forgot to fix the formula, and started the presses up again. Then the publishers realized they`d missed the formula correction so they stopped the presses again. The result is a first edition with three states. The version with all three errors is the most desirable. The second state has the commas fixed. The third state has the formula corrected. The third state is the safest book, technically correct and reflecting the authors intent. If you`re planning to manufacture antimatter, it`s the one you want, but if you`re collecting books, it is the least valuable of the three versions.

There are whole books compiling these points. The best place to find such compilations is at a major library such as the New York State Library. Can you imagine the effort that goes into comparing hundreds of copies of the same book, line by line, comma by comma, to ferret out the errors and corrections that occurred during the printing process? It`s a mind-boggling obsession.

Moving on, we see that this book is presented, inscribed and signed. What this means is that the author autographed the book. Further, he presented the copy to someone and inscribed the copy with a note: "Hi Jimmy - Don`t try this without getting your mommy to help - Uncle George."

The reference to loose signatures begins the section describing condition. Pages are printed in large sheets, then folded into groups of pages called signatures. These signatures are then sewn together before the covers are attached. Over time and heavy use, the thread holding the signatures together breaks or stretches and the signatures become loose. Look at the top spine edge of most hardcover books and you`ll see the signatures. The other common form of binding today is called "perfect binding" (based on our recent tradition of naming things for their opposites.) Perfect binding is a cheap form of binding used in magazines, paperbacks, and many book club hardcovers. The pages are lain in a pile and glue is applied to the spine - like a note pad. With any significant use, the book splits open at the spine.