How to work out if your book is a first printing

The easiest and shortest explanation from someone else who didn't know.

I'm going to cut straight to the point:

Step 1:

Find the copyright page.

Step 2:

Look for the number line.

Step 3:

Does it have a one (1) in it? If yes, it's a first printing.

It doesn't matter if it's ascending:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Descending:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Or in a weird pattern like odds/evens:

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

It's still a first printing. If there is no 1, the next lowest number is the printing of your book.

For example:

10 9 8 7 6 5

In this case, the book is a fifth printing.

However:

Sometimes the number line's sole purpose isn't just to show what printing a book is--sometimes it also denotes the year it was printed.

In some books you may see this:

6 7 8 9 10 23 22 21 20

In this situation, the book is a sixth printing, and it was printed in 2020.

It is quite easy to tell when this is the case because one set of numbers will be ascending or descending in a different direction to the other, as seen above.

Additionally, if your book is new-ish, you'll recognise that 23, 22, 21, and 20 are years. If your book is a little older, it may have had many more print runs--potentially 20+. In this case, it should still be easy to identify what the numbers mean because unless your book is very old and from your great-grandparents, you'll know it wasn't published in the 1920s. A quick google search should reveal what year the book came out. Either way this doesn't happen very often :)

Examples with pictures in case you're a visual learner:

In this example of We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal there are a lot of number lines, because there were a lot of different editions of the book.

(My one is the ShelfLove Crate special edition, so it is the number line second from the bottom. I'll make a different post in a few weeks on 'How to find out what edition you have', but as this is solely about number lines, let's assume you know if your book is a hardcover, paperback, or has an exclusive cover from a bookstore or book box.)

In this example the number lines is a weird pattern, odds/evens. Even so, it is still a first printing as the lowest number on the line is 1.

Here's another example:

This is Serpent and Dove, and this number line is a bit wild--it has irrelevant publishing acronyms in the middle. But ignore them, or take note and dismiss them if yours has them too.

In this example the numbers on the left represent the year the book was printed, and in this situation you now already know it's also the lowest one, 20, so it was printed in 2020--but that is also not particularly relevant to this post.

The relevant number line is on the right, and as you can see it's descending. The lowest number there is 2. Thus, it is a second printing.

Hope this helped!