Sender: Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
A few comments, not entirely related:
1) I'm not sure Phil Metzger's suggestion that printing history codes
of the form "123456789 99 98 97 96 95 94 93" (etc.) are an artifact of
offset printing is accurate -- it's very little more difficult for a
printer to file a couple of numbers off a stereotype plate, or replace
them in a forme of type, than to mask or erase them in the offset
process. I'd be inclined to look elsewhere for the impetus -- we need
someone to undertake a bit of historical research here. (Who first
used such a code? How quickly did codes spread? There ought to be
some people in the publishing business still alive who remember
something about this -- perhaps a query in PW?)
2) Maybe the New Yorker folks are just bibliographically more
sophisticated than most publishers -- after all, what Phil describes
is almost certainly the 5th printing of the first edition (in our
technical bibliographical usage).
3) Codes don't have to hard to decipher to be codes. The reader is
always right, as Peter Graham points out, but each reader is
*necessarily* right only for that reader -- if everybody else thinks
it's a code, Peter's reference to a banana may not be very useful.
John Lancaster, Amherst College
(jlancaster@amherst.edu)