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<blockquote data-quote="Cognomen's Cassowary" data-source="post: 6871545" data-attributes="member: 6801445">As someone who works in a bookshop and spends a fair amount of each day researching and listing books for sale online, I can shed a little light on this situation. A printing or impression is a run of X number of copies within an edition, but those X copies need not be identical. They might be printed in batches with slight differences, deliberate or otherwise, resulting from corrections, different ink, or different equipment at different printers. (Many publishers do not print their own books.) In such a case, we will also number states, but these are almost never identifiable by the title and copyright pages. We might, to give a few examples, look for an uncorrected typo on p. 246, check the author's other works advertised on the dustjacket, or look at a certain descender on a &quot;y&quot; or &quot;q&quot; on p. 103 which got damaged somewhere in the print run. There are guidebooks and websites dedicated to identifying &quot;true firsts&quot; or &quot;first-firsts.&quot;It sounds in this case like the corrections were submitted midway through the print run, so only later states will have them.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Cognomen's Cassowary, post: 6871545, member: 6801445"] As someone who works in a bookshop and spends a fair amount of each day researching and listing books for sale online, I can shed a little light on this situation. A printing or impression is a run of X number of copies within an edition, but those X copies need not be identical. They might be printed in batches with slight differences, deliberate or otherwise, resulting from corrections, different ink, or different equipment at different printers. (Many publishers do not print their own books.) In such a case, we will also number [I]states[/I], but these are almost never identifiable by the title and copyright pages. We might, to give a few examples, look for an uncorrected typo on p. 246, check the author's other works advertised on the dustjacket, or look at a certain descender on a "y" or "q" on p. 103 which got damaged somewhere in the print run. There are guidebooks and websites dedicated to identifying "true firsts" or "first-firsts." It sounds in this case like the corrections were submitted midway through the print run, so only later states will have them. [/QUOTE]

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