ppint. ● 5th Dec 2020
| | simultaneous near-identical first printings sharing merkin-printed covers
cover art by gene szafran (signed)
b+w maps by karen anderson (signed with her initials)
cat# W7003
refer to indica printing history to see if carcass of copy held was canadadian- or merkin- printed
no priority established nor liable to be, both state first printing, may, 1976 and give full first printing number line 123456789
the ''451'' is the publisher number identification code for (most) new american library imprints including signet, mentor, plume etc, issued by the standard book number scheme managers in a first step towards their using the international standard book number (isbn) system.
at least some non-nal imprints distributed by nal from round about this date also stuck nal's 451 on their covers in front of their books cat#s, especially on their spines (often followed by the book's merkin cover price in cents, in three digits): this was an aid to the news wholesalers and publishers as it enabled the value of a box of whole copy returns segregated by cover price (and preferably also blocked by cat#/title) to be aggregated and checked as legitimate returns and calculated quickly in an age before bar-codes and bar-code scanners, as hand-held calculators became increasingly widespread.
the letter in front of the cat# indicates the nal merkin cover price; it was also used on (?all?) of the non-nal group mmpbs they distributed, prefixed by a letter indicating which non-nal publisher - e.g. daw books' cat#s starting UW indicated daw books & merkin cover price $1.50.
mmpbs' canadadian and merkin cover prices diverged increasingly from the early-mid seventies onwards: most publishers printed both on their books' covers in the states and shipped some of these to the printers of the canadadian book carcasses - if the covers were produced by local canadadian printers, this was for a time indicated visually by a maple leaf on the cover - but sometimes this was added incorrectly, on merkin-printed covers on canadadian-carcassed copies. |