How do you date a book? My writing partner Elizabeth likes old books. She once asked how you date a book without the usual copyright page (the traditional “n.d.” or “no date” for all those school papers we had to write. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing the question became. As a convention, I often say a book was “written in” a certain year. I can’t know that, of course. I have written several books. Most of them span at least a year. A book with a copyright page is a fairly recent development. The older convention was to print the date on the title page, along with the author and place of publication. That would tell you when the book was actually produced. Books, however, can be rebound. In fact, some of the most unusual findings in the manuscript world have come in books that were rebound together with material not in the original printing. Paperback binding wasn’t even invented until the 1930s, and reb...
Blog of a struggling writer.