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Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone held a garage sale in the Portland area and had people with barcode readers pricing every book your selling? (And at 8am)

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My dad has a friend who has been a book hound for half a century and says coders are everywhere now and relatively bad at it - they’re utterly flummoxed by books without isbns for example.

Where’s your ‘ttoo?

Unscanable! An unscanable!

Now I'm wondering if there's a publishing equivalent of the "dead wax" on a record: some little marks that a printer makes that you have to know to look for.

There are indicators used to show which printing it is on some (most) books, but there are details that people can use to determine if a book is a first printing.

Yes publishers often have first edition logos that are different from or accompany their normal logo but it’s far from a fool proof method, especially for pre-20th century publications.

Book collectors depend on bibliographies that catalog publications and their print runs, sometimes providing detail on identifying features (like spelling mistakes fixed in later editions). Most bibliographies focus on a specific niche, era, or even an especially large collection. For particularly interesting books, provenance is often just as important as with artifacts.

I don’t even bother collecting anything with an ISBN unless it’s a rare short run nonfiction book. Completely pointless exercise with all the brainless competition.

There’s something about having to pour over paper bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat from the chaff.

> There’s something about having to pour over paper bibliographies to identify first editions by spelling mistakes and print errors that really separates the wheat from the chaff.

It truly is fun. In my case, it's trolling through old biographies of a minority language, hunting down authors names and then the names of their books. But it's great fun as often there's never been a complete list of these works compiled, so I'm sorta now the go-to person for a specific dialect region with regards to books by authors of the region.

My particular specialty is pre-Standard books written by authors from Conamara, in Ireland. I'm at the point where I have most of the first editions I know about from before the standard, with only three, at most (I need to get to a library to compare editions of one, as I think I have the school edition but am not sure if the school was the first edition published), eluding me. Then I'll branch out into other, similar dialectal regions.

It's so fun hitting up used bookshops for books in another language, and types of books like that. I'm kinda looking forward to expanding my dialectal region as it'll allow me to basically start the hunt all over again.

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