When Is An Error Not a Point?

In his ABC for Book Collectors, John Carter defined a "Point" as "any peculiarity in a book whose presence in or absence from a particular copy serves to distinguish it from other copies not so marked. It is most often used of those bibliographical peculiarities that provide evidence (or alleged evidence) for priority of issue, binding variants, misprints, variant advertisements, cancels, textual changes, etc."

The most famous point is probably "stoppped" with three Ps on page 181 of the first printing of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Another well-known point is the exclamation mark on the jacket of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (booksellers have decided the ! is the first issue; GGM's exhaustive bibliographer isn't so sure). The presense of the right point can double or triple or more the value of a book.

Recently, I've been thinking about what constitutes a "point" that will drive collectors mad. In most cases, points are simply errors. Hemingway didn't want "stoppped" to appear in his book - it was a mistake. Most points are, and when they get fixed, they create variants that collectors want.

But not all mistakes create points in the mind of the collectors, and I don't quite know why. For example, my wife has been promoting her upcoming book at trade shows and she's there with a lot of other authors. At one event, each author got a bag of books signed by all the other authors. One of the books was The Uses of Enchantment, by Heidi Julavits, the editor of The Believer, a hip literary magazine. Some of the books were bound upside down, which wouldn't be a big deal except there is a cut-out on the cover where the words, "A Novel" are supposed to appear.

Collectors have never considered books bound upside down to be collectable or even worth noting in bibliographies. But if instead of printing "The Novel" on the back, the publisher had mispelled one of the words, that would be a point. If someone had fed the wrong color of material into the binding machine, that would be a valuable variant. Why are some errors points valued by collectors and others just errors, making the books nearly worthless on the market? I don't really know.

On Abebook's forum, someone asked a similar question about a book that had been bound in the wrong cover entirely--one book inside and another on the outside. As "Shannon" put it succinctly, " Books are different from coins and stamps - a misbound book is worthless rather than valuable." That is, unless the mistake was using the wrong color on the cover. Then it's extra-valuable.