How To Spot A First Edition Book

As you may or may not know, first edition books are very collectible. And it's not just the old classics that are worth vast sums of money, first edition modern books can also sell at a huge price depending on the popularity of the author and the rarity of the book. Even first edition books as popular as Harry Potter can be worth a small fortune, especially with the earlier books of the series.

Harry Potter obviously became hugely popular, with fans camping outside bookshops for days waiting to get their hands on one of the first new copies. However, when the first book 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' was first published, no one knew just how big a phenomenon the series would become, so only a few hundred were printed. Then when it started to take off the publishers printed off more copies to meet the demand. These new copies will look exactly the same as the originals, but now they have become 'first edition, second printing' copies. It's the original 'first edition, first printing' copies that collectors really want to get their hands on and will pay ridiculous amounts of money to get them. But to find a first edition Philosopher's Stone is extremely rare. The easiest way to tell if you have one is to check that the author credited is 'Joanne Rowling', the pen name of J.K Rowling was taken up for the second batch of copies onwards. If you find a Joanne on your bookshelf then you are on to a winner! 

As the series went on and with the release of the film adaptations, the popularity grew enormously, and so did the quantities of first prints released. So if you have a first edition Deathly Hallows then it probably won't be worth much more than a fiver...unless of course it is signed. Fans go mad for a J.K scrawl, in October 2012 a signed copy of Deathly Hallows sold on AbeBooks for £3161!

So the big question is, how can you really tell if a book is a first edition? Well, check out this simple video from AbeBooks and you will find out...p.s, I have mentioned AbeBooks twice in this post, I'm not trying to endorse them, and as yet I do not sell with them. The site is just very informative. If you have a first edition lying around, try putting the title and author into their search engine to see what kind of price they are selling for, don't forget to click the first edition button to refine the results. They also have a very interesting archive of the most expensive books sold on the site every month. Great to see what you should be keeping an eye out for!

Happy hunting...

Siobhan x