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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manycats, post: 2996967, member: 13761&quot;]Okay. I am looking at Leslie Linder&#039;s <b>A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter</b>, 1971, published by Warne, the original publisher of the Peter Rabbit books. It has four maddeningly vague appendixes with SOME bibliographic information which is helpful but often not decisive in identifying early printings, much of it pieced together from the publisher&#039;s records, and revolving around the illustrations on the endsheets, date if any on title page, and other small textual changes.</p><p><br /></p><p>Until some unspecified time, but AFTER 1922 (the approximate date of an 85-page JT-M I have in hand), most of the books had 85 pages, including many blanks; &quot;current&quot; (i.e. circa 1971) printings had 59 pages. He does not specify, as far as I can tell, WHEN this switch occurred.</p><p><br /></p><p>The four-color process used in printing the color plates required different paper than regular text paper, a glossy clay-coated stock that takes the fine color plates better, but is a bit more delicate than ordinary uncoated paper. One COULD print both sides, but I expect you would run the risk of damaging one side or the other, thus rendering it unusable, so they didn&#039;t try. Usually you see such pictures as tipped-in plates in larger books, &quot;tipped-in&quot; meaning they are glued in along the inner edge, not bound in, involving more hand-work. Simply folding and sewing in the color pages, as in the Potter books, would have been cheaper, though leaving those vexing blank pages. Because the sheets are folded in quarters or eighths, you have blank pages facing other blank pages, which does indeed look like a printing error to modern eyes.</p><p><br /></p><p>British publishers of the day were EXCEEDINGLY fiscally cautious (they still are - only 500 hardcover copies of the first Harry Potter book were originally printed!) - the first printing of Peter Rabbit was of only 250 copies, which is remarkable when you consider that the cost of preparing the color plates would be the majority of the expense - once you have the plates cut, it&#039;s not that much more expensive to print more copies, but you don&#039;t want unsold kid&#039;s books gathering dust in your warehouse![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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