What's So Special About a First Edition?

Collectors of baseball cards know that an original Mickey Mantle rookie card is worth thousands of dollars more than a replica produced decades after the first production of the card. Book collection works in exactly the same fashion. In fact, many collectors will only seek and purchase first edition books. The idea of obtaining one of the first of only a thousand or potentially fewer of a work of literature from the 18th century is highly exciting. If you could find such a book you would be able to turn the pages of a legitimate article of literature history. Regardless of sappy intrigue for those easily excited by such a possibility, the hard reality of the book collecting industry is that a first edition book is much more valuable than any other edition.

What Exactly is an Edition?

Ok, so a first edition is important, but what exactly is an edition? The word "edition" almost always refers to a printing run of a book. An edition can have multiple printings, but each of these printing uses the same text and the same typeface. If an edition is printed one hundred times because the book's popularity demands that many reprints, but each printing is exactly the same, then each printing is part of the same edition. If a font is changed, a cover altered, the text edited, lengthened, or any of numerous changes that can happen to a book, then the edition also changes.

The term can, however, be slightly confusing. While the original run of a book is always the first edition, other publishers sometimes obtain the rights to publish a book (this phenomenon occurs often for book clubs) and then print the book as a first edition for that publisher. Sometimes a book club version of a novel will be noted as a "first edition." Technically, this label might be correct, but to the book historian this practice is completely invalid and often viewed as disingenuous. For this reason being able to identify true first editions becomes extremely important.