Latest Updates - Brian N. Ball

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Comment by ppint.:

renumbered cat# 5056 in david & charles' great renumbering™ when they bought the readers union group of book clubs from dent in 12/1972, and assigned new cat#s to the sfbc books in stock - in alphabetical order of their titles (!), during 12/1972 - 1/1973 -

- but this is liable to prove to be of largely academic interest, since david & charles manglementpersons appear to've forborne to instruct any working employee to print, write, stamp or scrawl the new cat#s on the existing stock. . .

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Comment by ppint.:

j. m. dent & sons readers union group the science fiction book club first printing, not first uk h/cvr edition
for sale only to members of the science fiction book club by post, on an opt-out, semi-inertia sales subscription basis, later on also to members of the other readers union book clubs as an option, and from time-to-time as a cheap/"free" inducement to join the book club

cover (d-j) art by terry james
cover (d-j) price (?c. 10/- including postage & packing)
148pp? (check) including titles, indicia etc, bound with endpapers between covered boards

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Comment by ppint.:

timepiece series #3:

#1: ''timepiece'' (1968), q.v. for series listing, and links.

(seen stated to've been intended to be a pentalogy, but no source for this statement was given)

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Comment by ppint.:

the d-j bears dennis dobson's full in-print science fiction catalogue°, as was usual: brian ball's "timepiece" is listed, but not "timepivot" - and i do not recall ever seeing a dennis dobson edition of the second novel in this series.

° - listed by author/editor and title only, no (i)sbn or cover price

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Comment by ppint.:

dennis dobson h/cvr first printing, first edition

cover (d-j) art by richard weaver (unsigned b+w art, credited for design on d-j front flap)
cover (d-j) price c. £1.75 (check)
192pp. (check) including titles, indicia etc, bound with endpapers between cloth-covered boards

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Comment by ppint.:

the statement - or claim - that the ballantine mmpb is/was an original is (and was) at least debatable.

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Comment by ppint.:

the three-digit last element of the number string stated to be the american sbn is the cover price in cents; it is not in fact part of the book's sbn, as the standard book number is/was defined as a nine digit number, the first element of which identifies the publisher, the second element identified the book title in that publisher's then-current catalogue (which allows for eventual re-used of any particular sbn), and the final digit is the checksum digit calculated from the first eight digits allowing errors to be detected (and, if this was the most common error, that of the accidental swapping of two adjacent digits, allowing this to be identified and corrected by a human being or, later, a computer program routine).

possibly because of the way the failing rival - and incompatible - abn (american book number) system, which does not seem ever to have made use of a checksum digit, had been used, different merkin mmpb publishers committed a variety of more(-or-less) catastrophically non-compliant variations when they began to adopt the sbn (standard book number) system, up to and including creating fake, and usually - almost inevitably - non-checksum-digit-system-compliant - "isbn"s.

the standard book number system was later extended to become the international standard book number system by prepending (or deeming to have been prepended) the digit zero, 0, to all current sbn system numbers; being arithmetically equivalent to these isbn ("isbn10" on bookcat) numbers, 9-digit sbn system numbers may be treated identically by number-crunchers human, mechanical, electrical and electronic.

the much later isbn13 system is not backwards-compatible with the sbn/isbn10 system.

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Comment by ppint.:

intext publishing group ballantine books imprint mmpb simultaneous near-identical first printings sharing merkin-printed covers

cover art by mort engel (unsigned, credited as by mort engle; full first name seems to've been morton)
cat# 01903
sbn 345-01903-2
cover price 75¢
192pp. including titles, indicia etc, end pp. advertising

refer to indicia publishing history to see if carcass of copy held was canadian- or merkin- printed
no priority established nor liable to be, both state first american edition: april, 1970
refer to indicia publishing history to see if carcass of copy held was canadian- or merkin- printed
no priority established nor liable to be, both state first american edition: april, 1970

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Comment by ppint.:

timepiece series #2:

#1: ''timepiece'' (1968), q.v. for series listing, and links.

(seen stated to've been intended to be a pentalogy, but no source for this statement was given)

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Comment by ppint.:

intext publishing group ballantine books imprint mmpb simultaneous near-identical first printings sharing merkin-printed covers

cover art by tom adams (unsigned, credited)
cover price 95¢
192pp. including titles, indicia etc, end pp. advertising

refer to indicia publishing history to see if carcass of copy held was canadian- or merkin- printed
no priority established nor liable to be, both state first printing: december, 1970

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Comment by 23skidoo:

Cover art is the same as that used for the first UK edition of the James Bond novel, Colonel Sun! The cover hasn't been scanned in yet as of the time of this post, but you can see it here