McBride First Edition Guide Available for Download
September 25th, 2006 by Alan Chudnow
No matter what a collector chooses as the theme of a Science Ficiton or Fantasy book collection, be it a particular author’s work, a particular publisher’s series, Hugo award winners, what have you, almost every collector will decide to collect First Editions. They are the most prized copies of a book and among the book collecting world the only copies worth having in a true collection.
Determining the edition of a book has always been one the more difficult tasks for any collector. Over the years there have been a number of standard references for determining the first edition of Science Fiction and Fantasy books and magazines. Unfortunately many of these are out of print and hard to find.
In the larger antiquarian world two of the standard references for determining first edition are Bill McBride’s The Pocket Guide to Identifying First Editions and Points of Issue. They are both equally valuable for the Fantasy and Science Fiction collector and both are now available for download.
The Guide is very easy to use. You select the publisher of interest from a scrollable window or do a standard search. The program will display the publisher and give you the exact method the company uses to show edition. There are also options to pick your default font and size for each line of the results display.
The cost is very inexpensive. The download version costs $19.95, the CD-Rom is $24.95. The actual printed booklets themselves are $15.95. The electronic version would be particularly handy if you happen to use a handheld PC in your book searching.
There is a free demo availably that contains a small percentage of the over 3600 publisher listings in the complete version and the first three sections of the informative introductory text.
The download, CD-Rom and original booklets are available at www.mcbridepublisher.com.
