Why Numbers Are Removed Rather Than Added
With each successive reprint, the publisher needs to instruct the printer to change the impression number, and the theory is that the printer is less likely to make a mistake if they are only removing the lowest number rather than introducing a new number each time. With this arrangement, all the printer has to do is "rub off" the last number in sequence. By changing only the outer number it means that the fewest possible changes are made to the page of characters, which means the smallest possible charge to the publisher. In the days of hot-metal printing, where each character was a metal block, all the printer had to do was to physically pick out the relevant blocks from the "sheet" and then the stack of blocks which would have been laboriously laid out when the page was first set up could be inked up for the reprint. In the case of a Linotype slug, the lowest number could be filed off and the slug reused. In either case, the change was minimal.
Read more about this topic: Printer's Key
Famous quotes containing the words numbers, removed and/or added:
“Out of the darkness where Philomela sat,
Her fairy numbers issued. What then ailed me?
My ears are called capacious but they failed me,
Her classics registered a little flat!
I rose, and venomously spat.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)