What do the numbers on the copyright page of a book 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 mean?

Answer 1

The lowest number appearing is the printing/edition number. When a new printing is done the lowest number is ground off. Your example would be 3rd printing. A first printing is sometimes sought after by collectors.

Answer 2

The printers key, also known as a number line, is a convention that publishers started to use after World War II to indicate the print run of a book. It is found on the title page.

Usually it's a series of numbers or letters as in the following examples:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
a b c d e f g h i j k

Sometimes rather than follow in series the numbers alternate from left to right for example:

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

If "1" is seen then the book is the first printing of that edition. If it is the second printing then the "1" is removed. Which means that the lowest number seen will be "2".

Sometimes number lines will also include a date line for example:

2 3 4 70 71 72

This indicates a second printing that took place in 1970.

First Edition Vs First Printing
Bibliographers usually define a first edition as printings from substanially the same type setting, no matter how many printings are done. Book collectors tend to define a first edition as the first print of the first edition. For further information please see first edition.

Why Numbers are Removed and Not Added
With each successive reprint, the publisher needs to instruct the printer to change the impression number, and the theory is that the printer is less likely to make a mistake if they are only removing the lowest number rather than introducing a new number each time. With this arrangement, all the printer has to do is "rub off" the outer number that's lowest in the sequence. By changing only the outer number it means that the fewest possible changes are made to the page of characters, which means the smallest possible charge to the publisher. In the days of hot-metal printing, where each character was a metal block, all the printer had to was to physically pick out the relevant blocks from the "sheet" and then the stack of blocks which would have been laboriously laid out when the page was first set up could be inked up for the reprint.


First Edition

The term first edition traditionally refers to all copies of a book printed with the same or substantially the same setting of type. However, the precise meaning has slight, but significant, variations in the fields of bibliography, book collecting, and publishing.

Bibliographers' definition
The classic explanation of edition was given by Fredson Bowers in Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Bowers wrote that an edition is “the whole number of copies printed at any time or times from substantially the same setting of type-pages,” including “all issues and variant states existing within its basic type-setting, as well as all impressions.”

Over the years, Bowers’s definition of edition has been slightly streamlined by other bibliographers. What remains, however, is the core: an edition is all copies of a book printed “from substantially the same setting of type,” including all minor typographical variants.

In the lead type era, printers usually did not have enough type to keep an entire book set up and ready for printing. As a result, nearly every time a book was printed, it had to be reset and that created a new edition. From time to time, in the middle of printing a book, an error in the text or a piece of broken type would be spotted, the presses stopped, and the problem fixed. These minor changes introduced typographical variations in the finished books. Some books would contain the mistake or broken type while others would incorporate the changes. These changes do not constitute a new edition.

In the modern era, books are typeset electronically, and a book may go through hundreds of printings using the same setting of type. Publishers often use the same typesetting for the hardcover and trade paperback versions of a book. While these books may have different covers and small changes to the title page and copyright page, from a bibliographer's standpoint, they are technically part of the same edition.

Book collectors' definition
Book collectors generally use the term "first edition" as shorthand for "first edition, first printing" (or "first edition, first impression" in the United Kingdom). Often post World War II books include a number line aka printers key that indicates the print run of an edition.

Bowers defines a "printing" as “the whole number of copies of an edition printed from identical type-pages at any one time.” Book collectors do not consider a second printing of a book using the same typesetting to be a first edition, although bibliographers do.

Publishers' definition
The term "first edition" does not have a standard definition in the publishing world. Publishers use the term for their own purposes, with little consistency. Publishers of trade books may mark a book "first edition" on the copyright page, but this may mean that it is the first edition by the current publisher, ignoring previous versions, or it may be the first edition with a particular set of illustrations or editorial commentary. Textbook publishers often use the term edition to distinguish between revisions of the text.

Sources of confusion
A common complaint of book collectors is that the term first edition is used incorrectly. Typically, this complaint centers on the use of the bibliographer's definition in a book-collecting context. For example, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye remains in print in hardcover. The typesetting remains the same as the 1951 first printing and therefore all hardcover copies are, for the bibliographer, the first edition. Book collectors would use the term first edition for the first printing only.

When a first is not a first edition
The word “first” in "first edition" might seem to refer to absolute chronological priority of publication, but in collecting and bibliographical terms, this is often not the case. “First edition” most often refers to the first commercial publication of a work between its own covers, even if it appeared earlier in another form such as in a periodical or advance copies—bound galleys, uncorrected proofs, advance reading copies—sent out by publishers to book reviewers, booksellers, and others in the literary or public relations fields.

As an example, the complete text of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea appeared in the September 1, 1952 issue of Life magazine, yet the generally accepted “first” edition is the hardcover book Scribner’s published on September 8, 1952.

A further distinction is sometimes made with the term "first trade edition," referring to the earliest edition of a book offered for sale to the general public in book stores. For example, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle was published in two variant forms. The first trade edition was published by Doubleday, Page and was sold in bookstores. The other, published by the Jungle Publishing Company, was a "Sustainers' Edition" sent to subscribers who had advanced funds to Sinclair.

Proofs as first editions
A small number of book collectors, particularly in the science fiction field, hold that the earliest bound advance copies of a book, typically an uncorrected proof or an advance reading copy, is the true first edition. This view points out that these books are printed, bound, and distributed, albeit not widely, by the publisher to a reading public consisting of reviewers, wholesale book buyers, etc. This view is held by a small minority of book collectors and an even smaller number of bibliographers.

Answer 3

that's the number of the books including that book that were published that year

Answer 4

They indicate which printing of a book that copy came from. There's a lot of arcane stuff to it, but the sequence you've written indicates a copy from the second printing of a book.

Answer 5

i believe they mean what edition the book is in (ie, how many times it's been reprinted).