Two Pocket Guides

by Bill McBride

Budget Printing, 2000. Thin, stapled paperbacks, 100 pages and 93 pages respectively. "Identifications" is now in its 6th printing. Handy little guide books that are easy to carry and a wealth of information. More than 3,000 publishers listed in the little blue book, and it generally tells how to spot a first edition from each major house. "Points of Issue" is listed by author, and gives a lot of little tidbits about how to identify a first printing of an author's more famous books. For example, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (NY 1926), the first printing of the first edition, page 181, line 26, the word "stoppped" appears (misspelled). Bibliophiles live for this stuff. Exciting, isn't it?