Here is where I show off my lack of knowledge about book publishing.
It was my impression that books are printed on large sheets of paper that might be something like 5 feet across. Those sheets would then go to a cutting room where they are also collated into folded pages. I'd guess there couldn't be more than twenty or so pages folded over in one bunch. Then these bunches are collated and sent to a bindery. I never saw how a bindery works, but I don't think of printing presses being the last stage of book production. So, the question is, was that "first off the press" just a metaphorical description? It seems like the first out of the bindery would be more accurate. Regardless of the manufacturing process, that first book has got to be valuable.
I think that e-books have taken some of the glory out of book publishing. Anybody can self-publish now and days. Plus it just doesn't sound right to be the first to download a .pdf copy of some author's work. Not that e-books are .pdf, but still.
You are correct about traditional book publishing by major publishers being huge sheets of paper.
However, I'm guessing there are something like 14 sheets of paper to a 300 page book.
If they were printing 1000 books, naturally they would print 1000 of the first sheet, 1000 of the second, etc.
A smaller publishing company uses a smaller paper size, yet still huge sheet of paper, about the size currency is printed on.
It is still the same process on a smaller scale as the larger publishers. Maybe doing only 250 books at a time.
Below them are vanity style publishing companies, who may only do 25 to 50 books at a time. They usually use laser type offset printing machines, so would still do each sheet at a time. Most vanity press books, even if hard cover, are not traditionally bound, they are more like a soft-bound book, glued instead of bound, and the hard cover added over the finished book.
Below vanity presses are POD (Print On Demand) publishers. Here, books are printed one book at a time, using laser driven ink technology, or sometimes laser toner technology like a laser printer, but where the pages won't stick together. So not exactly like our home laser printers. They use the size of paper that four pages of the book are printed on, then collated, cut only on the binding edge, glued, and then the color paperback cover added, which is made on a different machine and dropped in before the books final trim cut, for top, bottom, and open end pages.
In this case, the first book out of the machine is truly the first book off the press.
But even on all the other major printing methods, there is still one book that was completed first.
Also like my hydroculture growing chamber, they always run about 10 or 20 pots to get the temp just right, and the mold opening and closing just right, most have small flaws in them, and are just recycled. So if you get technical, no my first pot out of the mold was not really the first pot, but it was the first pot when they flipped the switch to start the production run. I got both the first and second pot that came out of the machine. Needless to say, both pots were identical since they came out of the same mold. But I still had phun with them. The first one out was marked with a white grease pencil on the bottom.
I took them home and set them on the counter, and asked my frau if she could tell the difference between the two pots, other than the white mark on one.
She studied them and studied them trying to see something different, she finally gave up and asked what the difference was.
I told her to pick up the one with the white mark on the bottom.
I said the one you are holding cost over $140,000.00, and the one on the counter only cost $4.78
Glad she wasn't blonde or she would have said I shouldn't have paid that much for the first one, if I could get them for only $4.78, hi hi.
My wife's brother-in-law was a school librarian in Iowa. The school taught grades 1-8 and eventually he became head of the library. In his capacity as librarian he attended a lot of conferences and read thousands of books. I'm pretty sure he could read a book a day with no trouble. Needless to say he met a lot of authors and got to knew a few personally. Over the years he collected an enormous number of first edition autographed books. I didn't know who most of the authors were because the books were intended for kids 12 years old and younger. In any case, he took pride in his collection of first editions, which I can now understand is not the same as first off the press. As happens with old librarians, they eventually retire. When this guy retired he and his wife moved down to Florida and bought a second home near Minneapolis. The reality of it all was that he could not move those thousands of first editions and had to dispose of most of them. He donated quite a few but was very distraught trying to decide which he could keep. He wanted them all. I can understand that and have a lot of sympathy. But really now, who would benefit from all those first editions after he is gone? They most certainly would be trashed.
I thought of George Burns and Gracie Allen when you started that story about the two pots.
First editions of even fairly unknown authors usually fetch at least ten times the cover price. Even more if an author is well known, even in the children's book category.
Naturally, if the author becomes popular, first edition books become collectors items, even if the author is still living.
But then too, it has to be something a collector wants.
I had all the books and paperwork that came in the glove box of a 1956 Ford Sunliner.
By cousin bought it new, drove it for ten years and sold it to me in 1966.
A month later I bought a new 1966 Impala and parked the Sunliner in one of our warehouses to work on.
Before I took it to Eddie Auto Top to have a new convertible top put on it, I took everything out of the car, stuck it in a box and stashed it somewhere.
A couple of years later I sold it and the Impala to buy 1968 Camaro.
I got more for the twelve year old Sunliner than I did for the two year old Impala and I got a good price for the Impala.
I couldn't find the box of paperwork from the glove box of the Sunliner when I sold it, and more or less forgot about it.
Mom and dad moved into a new house in 1966, and I only lived there about a year before taking an apartment in Brentwood closer to work. Needless to say, almost everything I owned was packed in boxes, which got mixed up with other boxes and stored in mom and dad's basement.
Fast forward twenty years to when I was remarried and living in Creve Coeur. Mom was emptying her house after dad died and ran across several boxes of mine, which I hauled to my house to go through. Lo and behold, in a small file folders came in, was the paperwork from the Sunliner. I almost threw it away as useless junk. Perhaps it was from a 1957 Chevy it might be worth something, but from a 1956 Ford, not likely.
At the time I was working part time at Tradin' Times newspaper and snagged a couple of free lines in their automotive section, rather than sticking a dummy ad in there I placed a two line ad for the 1956 Sunliner original book and paperwork, best offer takes it. I never dreamed I would get so many calls. Would you believe I got over 150 dollars for that box of paperwork. It even had the original window sticker and dealers invoice. The guy who got it was elated!
I am amazed at what that box of paperwork for the Sunliner got you. Who would have thought it had any value at all? Collectors are amazing people. I knew o lady living in Detroit who collected buttons. You can't believe how much variety there is in such a simple item. She had thousands when I viewed the collection about 40 years ago. I still regret not taking pictures. The lady, no doubt, is long gone. My guess is her buttons ended up in a recycle bin. Some were beauties, but must were just buttons to me.
I had an aunt who collected thimbles, sewing thimbles. But I'll get back to her in a minute.
My first wife's aunt Helen Heasley collected salt shakers. It's almost all she talked about when we stopped by to visit.
She lived in a triple-wide mobile home, with a concrete block warehouse/show room behind the trailers.
I think when that block building was constructed it had to do with the utilities for the trailer park, and was abandoned for years. Right before the park changed hands, she bought her lot and the building with it.
Then from the back door of her mobile home to the block building was enclosed with a covered walkway which provided a side entrance to the building.
It was in this building that she displayed all of her salt shakers. I guess I should say salt and pepper shakers.
She made an excellent living selling duplicates she came across, but never sold a single one that she didn't have a duplicate for.
When she passed away, her estate trustee managed the sale of her collection, to prevent it being sold at auction.
When the last set was sold, they had amassed close to a million dollars, but after taxes they had less than half a million dollars.
In other words, aunt Helen was really rich and didn't even know it herself. She only bragged about having a collection of about 30 thousand dollars worth of salt and pepper shakers. She probably based that on the prices she paid.
OK, my crazy aunt Linnie Lee, who everyone called Billie.
Now, how many different kinds of sewing thimbles can you think of? Excluding the different decorations added to them.
Your first though it probably they have metal ones, and ceramic ones. What else?
She had several styles made from bone, ivory, leather from various animals, hooves, different types of glass, stone, ceramic, early hard plastics, later softer plastics, and at least six different types of metals, some spun metals, and some cast metals. There were even some made from hardwoods with bone insets in the top to make them durable.
The pride of her collection were those made from petrified wood or fossils.
Then, once you get beyond the basic materials they were made from, then they had the styles, types, and designs, from those same materials, still excluding the add-on ornamentation. She had a collection of enameled steel thimbles that were quite beautiful. And then of course all the painted designs on the various types.
After her husband died, and she started having a few strokes, her daughter began selling them off.
She was not very good at finding the right kind of buyers, so probably lost a lot of money in the process.
Even so, she made enough money to keep her mom in a 5-star nursing home the rest of her days.
I used to collect flower seed packets. Still have most of them, but not the old ones I had in my downtown office I never got back. They are not worth anything.
I kept most of the packets on display on one wall of my office, in the waiting area.
Salesmen quickly learned if they wanted to get in to see me more easily, they had to come bearing a flower seed packet I didn't already have on the wall. So this is how I amassed so many different ones during that era.
My wife's grandmother had a collection of salt and pepper shakers. It wasn't a large collection, probably less than a hundred pairs, but it was quite interesting. We inherited the set that looked like outhouses and were hand painted. LOL Apparently ol' Agnes didn't go out of her way to collect things. When she got into town and did a little shopping from time to time, she would just buy whatever the local shop had on hand. A few were gifts, but most were just everyday purchases from about a hundred years ago in a small Iowa farm town.
Some things are collectable because they don't make sense. Thimbles are one of those things. Wife's mom had a collection but they were not like the ones you described. They traveled a lot and she would pick up a thimble or two as a souvenir. Who would think of making a thimble out of ivory? or Leather? or petrified wood? It's totally amazing that such things exist.
When she got some of her leather thimbles, they came in a box of other things, and one unique thing in there was small rolled leather, often with two punch holes in them. Came to learn that they were actually buttons from the cowboy days or earlier.
When she went to sales, things like thimbles were usually in a box of old sewing things sold by the whole box at auctions.
From about the time she was in her late 40's, she went to as many estate sales as she could, and probably passed up many things she could have made a lot of money from, but her interest was only in thimbles, and sometimes oil lamps she knew she could resell to Belle Starr Antiques. She gave me a really neat oil lamp once, it had a hand painted glass base, and hand painted glass shade. The clear chimney was the tallest I had ever seen on an oil lamp. I'm sure this was made years before the cheaper oil and kerosene lamps came out, because of the thickness of the metal of the burner.
The metal framework that held up the shade was also super heavy solid brass too.
What was so unique about this lamp was the chimney sat in its own metal framework connected to a lever which lifted it straight up so you could light or trim the wick without touching the glass. And the wick itself was round not flat like in kerosene lamps, and it was probably about 4 or 5 feet long, coiled up inside the lamp. I imagine oil lamps needed their wicks trimmed quite often, compared to kerosene lamps. Even so, we used lamp oil in it which is basically kerosene instead of using olive oil which is what it was probably designed to use.
This is one of the many things I took to my downtown office and never got back.
I never realized how volatile and flammable was olive oil until I started cooking. To this day I don't know what sets it off, but I have had a couple fires start in a fry pan when I least expected them. This was back in the days when I used a gas range. Nothing cooks well on this electric one. It was the unexpected fires with olive oil that made me think I need a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Some day I'll get one. Really.
Corn oil, Sesame Seed oil, and Olive oil all have a flashpoint (also called smokepoint) of 410 degrees. Sunflower oil is only 390 degrees which is why it is not used much.
This is one of the problems with open flame cooktops with gas burners. You already have an ignition source, which can ignite the smoke instantly. Its pretty hard to ignite smoke with an electric burner without some of the oil splattering onto it to create an ignition source.
I can't remember the number of times my grandmother on my mom's side had dancing flames on her stove while cooking bacon when she had other pots on lit burners too. Sometimes we thought she enjoyed seeing those little dancing flames, because it is like she almost did it on purpose by moving pans closer to the edge of the burner away from her bacon skillet.
She always used the cheaper oils, for frying, like peanut or soybean oil, which has a high flashpoint of around 450 degrees. Naturally, bacon did not need to have an oil, hi hi.
I've only read about the smoke point of cooking oil, but apparently there is a Flash Point and a Fire Point. As I suspected, the flash/fire point is substantially above the smoke point. Unfortunately the table in the link doesn't cite olive oil, but I do use peanut oil and grape seed oils occasionally. I'm guessing from the looks of that table that olive oil won't flash or flame until it gets around 600F or more. I find it hard to believe my gas cooker could produces that much heat, but I can assure you I've seen spontaneously generated fires in my frying pans.
One of the reasons I switched to olive oil is because it doesn't contribute to the build up of cholesterol. It's kind of a preventative measure. My wife's readings were out of sight when she did all the cooking. I've been doing the olive oil thing for many years now and her readings are in the normal range. I can't say it's my cooking that is 100% responsible for that, but it helps. My cholesterol readings were always on the low side. As of yesterday, they still are. I also use grape seed oil when deep frying. It has a high smoke point but it not only prevents the formation of cholesterol it also provides vitamin E (I think it is) that contributes to improving the immune system. I often wonder how many grape seeds it takes to produce a liter of oil. LOL
