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why do books always have a page with a bunch of numbers on it

it has the copyright info and stuff but also there's always the line "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1"

@Felthry They actually have quite a specific meaning, and it's not always that exact sequence. It's meant to indicate which printing run the book is from.

When a new run is being set up, rather than completely redoing one page, they can remove one of the numbers from that page. That's much easier on a printing plate than additions or alterations are, because you can just sand the number off the plate.

Thus, the lowest number present indicates that this book is from the nth printing run of that edition.

@Felthry Some publishers use different sequences. There's also

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

and similar so that they're knocking numbers off the edges and the line always appears mostly centred.

@Terrana Oh! That's neat. I suppose that is easier, yeah.

I wonder if that will keep being done in the future out of tradition, even as offset printing (where you actually have plates like that) gets rarer.

@Felthry The practice is already disappearing. It's almost never done any more by British publishing houses, for example.

@Felthry I see that @Terrana already answered this one, but because I spent a little while digging through Wikipedia for it: the official name of the line of numbers is the "printer's key". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer%

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