By Ali Shaw, Executive Editor
Do you consider yourself a book nerd? I’m sure you’ve got books lining shelves in multiple rooms. Or maybe your tablet’s memory is full of ebooks and audiobooks. You’ve probably read a good variety of the classics, recent bestsellers, and maybe a few obscure authors in translation. But do you know publishing trivia?
Listen, I’m not here to issue or revoke Book Nerd licenses. But I do want to play a little book trivia game with you. Are you up for three questions? Let’s do it.
- Why are there numbers counting down on the copyright page of some books?
a. They indicate how many books have sold, like the print number on artist prints
b. They tell how many books the author has published
c. They refer to what print run this book came from.
d. They’re lottery numbers. Good luck!
- Why are there sometimes blank pages at the end of a book?
a. So you can write your notes for later.
b. Printers can only print and bind books with pages in specific multiples.
c. For tic-tac-toe, of course
d. The publisher wants you to think you’re getting a bigger book for your money.
- Why are frontmatter page numbers in Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) instead of Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3)?
a. To seem more fancy.
b. So you know what pages you can skip.
c. As a tribute to the first book makers, the Romans.
d. To save the book designer and printer time.
- Bonus question! Why must we include cities of publication in citations?
a. To differentiate between different publishers with the same name.
b. So you can visit the publisher headquarters.
c. So you can put pushpins in a wall map of all the cities your books come from.
d. All of the above and none all at once.
ANSWERS
- Why are there numbers counting down on the copyright page of some books?
a. They indicate how many books have sold, like the print number on artist prints
b. They tell how many books the author has published
c. They refer to what print run this book came from.
d. They’re lottery numbers. Good luck!
c. They refer to what print run this book came from.
When publishers use offset printing (as opposed to digital printing), a certain number of books are printed at once, usually several thousand, sometimes tens of thousands. In offset printing, printers create large plates that have the information to be printed. When it’s time for another print run, they load the plates on the printers, rub off the lowest number on the printer’s key, and print another set of books.
When books are digitally printed, especially with advances in digital printing technology in the last thirty years, the printer’s key is usually left out because the print run could be any number and the printing comes from a PDF on a computer, not large offset printing plates. And with print-on-demand, books are printed as they’re ordered, so a printer’s key wouldn’t even make sense.
- Why are there sometimes blank pages at the end of a book?
a. So you can write your notes for later.
b. Printers can only print and bind books with pages in specific multiples.
c. For tic-tac-toe, of course
d. The publisher wants you to think you’re getting a bigger book for your money.
b. Printers can only print and bind books with pages in specific multiples.
Remember those plates in offset printing we just talked about? They hold thirty-two book pages each, which are printed on one very large sheet and then folded and trimmed to make what’s called a signature. A book with 320 pages (including unnumbered pages) uses ten signatures. A book with 310 pages of text still uses ten signatures, but some of those pages are blank. Have you ever noticed that most children’s books these days are thirty-two pages? That’s why!
With digital and print-on-demand printing these days, page numbers don’t necessarily have to be in multiples of thirty-two, since books are printed from a PDF on file and sent to what look like glorified copy machines that print and bind the books, so the pages can be in any multiples. Still, many publishing companies typically choose offset printing because of the cost and quality, so you’ll probably still see books in signatures of thirty-two for years to come.
- Why are frontmatter page numbers in Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) instead of Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3)?
a. To seem more fancy.
b. So you know what pages you can skip.
c. As a tribute to the first book makers, the Romans.
d. To save the book designer and printer time.
I mean, I suppose b is true for some people, although if you operate with that assumption, you’ll miss out on the author’s introduction and other materials that can give you insight as to why the book was written and how best to use it.
The real answer is d: to save the book designer and printer time. Frontmatter pages include the title page, copyright page, dedication, introduction and/or foreword, and other pieces like that. Sometimes these can change at the last minute, like when the editor asks the author to add a How to Use This Book section to the introduction, or in future editions, like when a different expert in the field writes a foreword for a new edition. If the frontmatter has pages added or removed, it’s easy to just change the Roman numerals in that section, and no other pages in the whole book need to be changed. This was a really big deal back when book designers had to typeset each page by hand with metal type or by code in large computers. Nowadays, book designers can adjust page numbers pretty easily in InDesign, but the tradition still holds.
- Bonus question! Why must we include cities of publication in citations?
a. To differentiate between different publishers with the same name.
b. So you can visit the publisher headquarters.
c. So you can put pushpins in a wall map of all the cities your books come from.
d. All of the above and none all at once.
d. All of the above and none all at once.
College students and nonfiction writers surely know what I’m talking about here. When we quote from another source, we must cite our source to give proper credit and not plagiarize. That’s all well and good, but it’s a requirement in those source citations to include not just the title, author, publisher name, and publication date but also the city of the publisher.
When this requirement began, it surely made sense. Maybe there could be a Penguin Press in Nome, Alaska, and a Penguin Publishers in New York City. It was important to make it clear which press this particular book came from. But in the twenty-first century, the landscape of publishing has changed drastically—large publishers have bought other publishers and now have headquarters in Paris, London, and New York. Which city do we include? A publisher’s imprint could be located in Lisle, Illinois, but the big publisher is located in Denver, Colorado. Plus, with the ability to work remotely, so many publishers now do all their work online, with their team members reporting from around the world.
A trained editor knows how to cite all of those above scenarios, but that doesn’t mean they’re not confusing. The bigger issue is that more and more lately, books do not include a publication city on their copyright pages at all. And if those books are independently published or come from small publishing companies that only take correspondence by email, there may not be further information about the correct publication city online either. In these cases, we have to simply write “n.p.” for “no place listed” in the citation. As an editor who specializes primarily in nonfiction, I can tell you that more and more citations include “n.p.” these days.
So why do we still bother with this tradition? Maybe it’s just me, but this one doesn’t seem to have quite the nostalgic feel that the other traditions do. I would definitely pop some bubbly the day that The Chicago Manual of Style (the gold standard in book publishing) tells us we can start leaving off city of publication in citations, but I’m guessing that day is a long time off still.
Ali Shaw is a collector of books from all eras of publishing history. She loves picking up a book from the 1800s and taking a guess at the publication date—because many books back then didn’t include that—or examining the paper types chosen during war years due to shortages, or inspecting binding styles to compare glues from, say, the 1920s and the 1980s. Even comparing more modern books printed on demand from the Espresso Book Machine compared to IngramSpark compared to KDP is fascinating to her. If you’re a book nerd like that too, drop a comment below!
Thx!