Advertising Pages in Rare Books

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Erik Bosse. I'm with the Aldredge Bookstore. The back pages of some books, particularly older books from the 19th, 18th, 17th century, you're going to find, often times, and advertisements. Which are other books available from the publisher that gave you this book, that were available at the time of this books publication. This is valuable information when it comes down to the research trying to find out if the book that you have in your hand is a first edition, first printing. You have to look at very specific bibliographies and that's where the research might take you a fair amount of time because it might be as simple a case as finding out that this particular book should have 40 pages of ads to make it a first edition, a first printing and anything that has more than that is going to be a subsequent edition and worth somewhat less or a great deal less. Another important terminology is the binding of the book. The binding is the covers and what is covering the cover. Here we'll call this cloth. That's the terminology that is used for the most part although this is paper here. This is cloth here. But this would be considered a cloth binding. This as a paperback would be, the binding would either be wraps or a paper binding. And often times you'll see leather bindings offered for sale. This is a full leather bound book. Leather is covering all of the board. And often also you'll see these very decorative leather bound books where we've got sometimes often decorative paper and sometimes cloth. But the spine part of the cover and sometimes the corners are bound in leather. And this is a little slippery terminology. I've seen these books referred to as half bound and I've seen them referred to as three quarter bound."