A very special edition of The Dogs Who Found Me
For most of the past week, The Dogs Who Found Me has been #1 at Powells.com. Mysteriously. How can it be outselling everything, including even Scott Smith's The Ruins? I was skeptical, so I emailed the Powell's folks and said "What the heck is going on over there?" "We can't explain it either," they said. (The book has since slipped to #4)
Meanwhile, my publisher went back for an eighth printing. It used to be that collectors would seek out the first edition of any book, since it was the rarest of editions. I've often wondered the logic of that these days, because many books have HUGE first printings followed by modest reprints, which means that the rarest edition might be from the third printing rather than the first. In the case of my book, the first printing was fairly small, the second and third even smaller, followed by larger fourth and fifth printings, and various sized sixth and seventh printings.
Since there are a number of typos we've been trying to correct, I checked to see if they might catch them in this eighth version. It turns out that they were corrected in the seventh printing, which I still haven't seen. But someone forgot to alter the numbers on the copyright page, so it is labeled a FIRST printing! And there were actually several small corrections made in the second printing through the sixth. So there are now three versions in print: the original first printing, five reprints with some corrections, a second "first" printing with typos corrected by missing the corrections from the previous reprints, and and eighth printing with most of the corrections but not quite all of them.
So if you are a collector, look for that rare seventh printing that is masquerading as a first.
Meanwhile, my publisher went back for an eighth printing. It used to be that collectors would seek out the first edition of any book, since it was the rarest of editions. I've often wondered the logic of that these days, because many books have HUGE first printings followed by modest reprints, which means that the rarest edition might be from the third printing rather than the first. In the case of my book, the first printing was fairly small, the second and third even smaller, followed by larger fourth and fifth printings, and various sized sixth and seventh printings.
Since there are a number of typos we've been trying to correct, I checked to see if they might catch them in this eighth version. It turns out that they were corrected in the seventh printing, which I still haven't seen. But someone forgot to alter the numbers on the copyright page, so it is labeled a FIRST printing! And there were actually several small corrections made in the second printing through the sixth. So there are now three versions in print: the original first printing, five reprints with some corrections, a second "first" printing with typos corrected by missing the corrections from the previous reprints, and and eighth printing with most of the corrections but not quite all of them.
So if you are a collector, look for that rare seventh printing that is masquerading as a first.
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