From the Editor by Craig Stark #156, 9 April 2011

Call me obsessive, but as I develop as a bookseller, I look more and more to original source material for answers to bookselling questions. Take first edition identification. How much can we rely on present-day guides? Some have established reputations, some not, and many of them crib heavily from previous guides - so if there are errors, they are perpetuated. And not always at the buyer's expense. I think many booksellers are relatively comfortable using Zempel and Verkler's First Editions: A Guide to Identification because it relies exclusively on publisher's statements regarding how first editions are designated. But are publisher's statements always reliable? Of course not. Most publishers are more concerned about selling books than they are assisting collectors. But perhaps we can assume that they are more likely to be accurate than not, and in cases where they aren't, that some sort of corrective record exists, online or elsewhere. And besides, Z&V itself states in its Introduction that the guide is in part compiled from H.S. Boutell's First Editions of Today and How to Tell Them - that is, Z&V is two steps removed from the original source.

If you're an experienced bookseller, by now you surely know that the presence of the Scriber's "A" on the title page verso is usually (though not always) an indication of first edition status. But do you know when Scribner's first started using this designation? Here's the publisher's statement in Z&V: "On books published since 1930 first editions are indicated with a capital 'A' on the copyright page." If this statement is definitive, then there are at least a few booksellers out there who are cheating themselves. In a few minutes perusing bookseller listings of ca. 1929 Scribner's titles, I saw a half dozen descriptions which note the presence of the Scribner seal on the copyright page but, alas, no "A," and then make the assumption that their copy isn't a first. In the case of Hemingway's ca. 1929 A Farewell to Arms, this could be a costly assumption because the first edition has absolutely no "A" on the copyright page. Indeed, I found two listings of A Farewell to Arms that were apparently first editions but were represented as later printings. A little knowledge, they asy, can be dangerous.

But here's something intriguing - an original source: