Finding First Editions

Posted By GuestBlogger on August 29, 2010

First edition books can make a fantastic gifts for someone you love, but can often be very hard to find and extremely expensive. If you know what you’re looking for and where to look however, it is possible to find a few bargains.

If you’re trying to find a really special gift for a loved one, then you’d be well advised to try a 1st edition, especially for 18th birthday gifts. You have two main approaches if you’re looking to locate and buy a first edition. You can go for a newly released 1st edition, which will be in perfect condition and brand new. It won’t be as expensive and might become valuable in the future. Your other choice is to try and find a first edition of a much older book. Finding an old first edition can be much more difficult and will usually be expensive, although it has far more value and meaning as a gift.

If you take the time to find an old first edition, you’ll be showing the person how much they mean to you as the time and effort will be demonstrated by the gift. Being able to located first editions of people’s most treasured books make amazing personalised gifts.

You should try local charity shops if you’re looking to find bargain first editions; you might be looking for a while, but if you persevere you’re sure to come across something eventually. There are a couple of easy tell-tale signs to show the book is a first edition. Often books will clearly state if they’re a first edition, but if not you’ll need to check the printing run number. This is usually a sequence of numbers, and can be found at the bottom of one of the inner pages. You’re looking for the first ed, first pressing number, which is usually sequential from 10 down to 1.

You can even get quite cheap first editions now that might some day be valuable, such as the Harry Potter books. They shouldn’t cost too much and should be fairly easy to find, they also make fantastic stocking fillers.