Finding original printing information for books.

October 24, 2008 4:40 AM

How can I get bibliographic information on the original printing/first editions of books?

I'm looking for a website where I can find bibliographic information on the original printing of books published in both the US and UK. Many books are reprinted time and time again and Wikipedia only touches on popular books. Even then the information is lacking. Is there a site - or only a couple of sites - which catalogs nearly all books?

posted by magnoliasouth to writing & language (6 comments total)

I don't think there's a single website, but there are a pair of them which will probably get you what you want: the British Library and the U.S. Copyright Office. Both institutions attempt to maintain exhaustive lists of all materials published in their respective countries through some form of legal deposit. If a book is published in the UK, the publisher must send a copy to each copyright library, including the British Library, which is required by law to keep it. They're actually running into something of a problem there, as most of the hundreds of thousands of books published every year are utter crap (think harlequin romances) and they're just piling up in warehouses. Similarly, if a book is published in the US, two copies must be submitted to the Copyright Office, though that office does not actually keep them.

You might have a problem if you're looking for something published more than a few decades ago, as the Copyright Office doesn't maintain electronic records before 1978. The British Library's catalog does seem to be complete though.

The Library of Congress has an incredible catalog, so it's worth looking there too, but it is not and does not attempt to be exhaustive. You may also run into a problem in that the LOC will have books that weren't published in the US, as might the British Library. Still, for what you're trying to do, these websites are probably your best bet.
posted by valkyryn at 5:10 AM on October 24, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Excellent! Thank you very much. I was hoping for an ISBN number too, but apparently LOC doesn't offer that. The UK site does for their books though. Interestingly enough, the UK site offers some information on US books.
posted by magnoliasouth at 5:41 AM on October 24, 2008

If it's ISBNs you're after, you might try Amazon. Their "other editions" feature, while not complete, is fairly robust.
posted by valkyryn at 6:01 AM on October 24, 2008

If you're on a Mac, the free and free program Books can make it painless to do a lot of lookups. Go to the plugin manager under "Window" to enable quickfill lookups for LoC, Google Books, and a host of others, including Amazon UK, LoC and GB, between the two, are going to do do the best job of helping you find the first data a work was published, though they'll like do later editions, too.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:35 AM on October 24, 2008

Also, don't forget about WorldCat, which is a sort-of "catalog of library catalogs" for collections across the U.S. and, increasingly, around the world.
posted by arco at 8:52 AM on October 24, 2008

@ valkyryn: No, it's the actual bibliographic info I'm after, it's just the ISBN would be sort of like the icing on the cake. :)

@ Mo Nickels: Thanks for that, but no I'm not on a Mac. I checked Google Books and Amazon prior to posting here though.

@ arco: Wow what a great resource! This is definitely getting bookmarked. It even does up the bibliography for me.

Thank you to you all!
posted by magnoliasouth at 12:12 PM on October 24, 2008