pity... no previously unidentified changes to the character classes that I can see, thus far.
Yeah, probably worth adding in for the intermittent shading alone in that signature.

TheMilford wrote:Do we really wanna devote a whole "printing" designation to a possible few copies that used up remaining components that the printer had, before moving onto the next printing proper?

Short answer: Heck no.  It's a subprinting ("Alpha" or "Plus" designator) at best.  Definitely not worthy of trying to shift the whole sequence.  

Long answer:  As I see it, we have three possible options.

1.  Call it a 3rd Plus.  (Or 3rd Beta, but I prefer using letters when we have more than 2 variants within a family.)  This is consistent with the designation applied to the 3rd+ MM -- a book with third printing on the copyright page and a 4th printing cover.

2.  Call it a 4th Minus.  The reasoning is simple -- It's not quite a 4th, but more than a 3rd Plus.  Unlike the 3rd Plus MM, there is mixed content, indicating that the 4th printing signatures existed at least in part when this book was printed.

3.  Call it a mistake.  We don't even know that the "new" signatures are the 4th printing, yet.  This could be as late as a 6th printing book with a few old signatures, though I would find that unlikely.  Still, more verification would be desirable.

It's possible the printers had like twenty of signature 1 and five of signature 3 and one or two of signature 5 left... etc... thus you may very well find similar books with different signatures from the previous printing... no two or three alike. Dig?

Possible, sure.  But we've got no evidence of that.  We've got to work with what we have, and reconstruct from there.  So yeah, we dig.  And dig.  And dig.  It's actually been a very good week, archaeologically speaking.  

Unless these components yield a significant number of copies (say 100 or 50) consistently

That never happens in this niche of a niche of a niche hobby.  You will never find 50 or so copies of what you're looking for, or you wouldn't be looking for it.  Honestly, we'll be lucky if we can find the 2nd one, considering how few people are interested in this sort of thing.  By that logic, the 1st DMG wouldn't exist.  I'm pretty sure we haven't found 50 yet.

I would lump these in with anomalies like Misterspock's MM/PHB mutant.

So your vote would be option #3, mistake.  If it were just half of one book, and half another, I might tend to agree.  But it's not, see.

This is not just  a misplaced cover, or even cleaning up leftovers.  There appears to be a sort of primordial reasoning for the specific signatures selected -- almost like the book had an editor.  The reason for adding the new 2nd is obvious: the shading.  There happen to be a ton of tables in that particular signature.  So someone's looking at content and making a decision, not randomly throwing old/new together.  It's not an error at all, it's deliberate.

Still my vote would be for 3rd Plus over 4th Minus, given all we know for sure so far.  It consistent with the MM and it's just easier finding these things if the line designating the printing boundary is the copyright page.  Very few people are going to bother hunting through signatures.

deimos3428 wrote:Still my vote would be for 3rd Plus over 4th Minus

Or you could call it 3rd ± √-1.  Because it may be imaginary.  (That one was for you, smarmy)

I am digging out my PHBs, deimos.  Don't know if I'll be any help, but I'll give it a go.

deimos3428 wrote:Otherwise this one is fairly open-and-shut; it's a 3rd plus and should be listed as a separate printing.

Was worth checking a bit further, no? Thanks, again.

Yes; a good week (not just this) for digging.

Agreed re. following the printing as stated at the front of the book in the first instance regardless of what follows after, since any other method would be too "confusing".
Was just have a subtle jab that the chronology does not necessarily have to follow start-to-finish in strict order (i.e. a 1st Delta might be released after a 2nd Alpha) and, in some cases such as this, it might be very difficult to prove one way or another.

Agreed w/TheMilford for freak copies but also that this is a deliberate compilation rather than such an "accident", to update the product, and rather interesting that they /would/ take the time and effort (and expense) to presumably trash the other old 3rd print signatures and bind with only the most relevant updated ones. Worth it for three-eighths, I guess, but presuming that was at least a "box or two" or books rather than just a handful of copies, /if/ deliberately running off extra copies of the new signatures?
*
(Not that all "accidents" aren't worthy of listing... i.e. when you get two different books on different sides of the same page, rather than in separate signatures bound together by mistake).

Thanks again and interested to know what else is out there.

TheMilford wrote:I'm sure the same thing happened at RH/TSR based on orders placed for products as they needed it... only noticeable when changes were made from printing to printing.

It's an interesting theory, but we haven't really observed such a phenomenon to date.  If this were common practice at TSR I'd imagine there would be many more such examples cropping up, especially considering the number of times they changed the contents of the books!  Granted there are some printings where they wouldn't have to swap out all the signatures, but the assumption needs to be that they're new stock without a way to distinguish otherwise.

For example:  If you were to take a 3rd printing MM interior, swap out the first and last signatures, and stitch on a new cover you'd have something completely indistinguishable from a 4th Alpha MM, as far as we know.  You can't tell by looking at it whether the 2nd signature is old stock or not because no content has changed in that signature at all.  However, we do know it's not old stock in this example with a reasonable degree of certainty.

First, the content changes point towards the reason for a new printing -- the copyright page and the catalog pages are the only things that have changed in the interior.*  This suggests the printing was not constructed with the sole purpose of soaking up old stock, but to implement these important changes.  

Second, I admittedly cheated in this example.  We happen to know there's an intermittent printing, the 3rd Plus MM.  So the vast majority of leftover interiors, if any, would have become 3rd Plus.  As far as we can tell, that was the purpose of the 3rd Plus printing.  

Finally, it's possible they still had some 2nd through 6th signatures left after the 3rd Plus, but that'd be a mighty "convenient" assumption.  It's much more likely that the 4th Alphas are all-new stock than that they had precisely the leftover signatures they'd need to construct 4th Alphas but not additional 3rd Plus.

To get back to the PHB:  If they had a ton of leftover stock after the 3rd, I'd imagine we'd see another intermittent printing.  The 3rd Plus PHB in that event would be like the 3rd Plus MM -- with a complete old interior/new cover, as we originally believed to be the case.  But we don't see that.  This printing seems to be something more akin to the 4th Alpha MM.  We have content changes that suggest the printing was made for purposes beyond soaking up old stock.

---
*The vampire errata is there too, but it just so happens to be in the same signature as the more important catalog change.

SimperingToad wrote:Printing CD covers and such isn't the same as printing an entire signature. I've never heard of anyone printing extra signatures 'just in case' for a book. What happens if an error is found? That's a lot of money the printer eats. Overage is to account for printing errors, not printing extras.

More likely they kept changes to individual spreads whenever possible so there are fewer new press plates made down the line (the giant strength/hydra pic in the MM for an example). A change is made in one place, and the entire spread is looked over with a fine-tooth comb for other errors.

What I'm trying to explain is that when you have two different print mediums (covers and pages, and they may have even been printed at different facilities) in one product being made at high quantities then you WILL end up with over-run and under-run.

This is actually a cost saving practice for the printer to use up the overrun components before moving onto the freshly printed stuff.

All we need to do is find a production coordinator that worked at TSR or RH.

TheMilford wrote:What I'm trying to explain is that when you have two different print mediums (covers and pages, and they may have even been printed at different facilities) in one product being made at high quantities then you WILL end up with over-run and under-run.

Yes, that's fairly obvious.  It doesn't change the fact that we're seeing something different occurring here.  What I'm trying to explain is that it's not that bloody simple.

All we need to do is find a production coordinator that worked at TSR or RH.

I am not exactly sure what thirty-year anecdotal evidence would prove in lieu of concrete evidence.  Their memories, if any, could not be trusted and are supporting information at best.

We're observing it right now... also remember we're talking about a very small number compared to the actual run. We're in the 10% over-run and "transitional" printing territory.

No, we're not.  First of all, we don't know how many of these there are.  All we know is that we've found one, maybe two, and that the trend isn't for one-offs as you suggest.  You're trying to compare "general industry practice" to specific observation, and again, without any concrete observation it's meaningless.  

They might very well poke the assistant editors with a cattle prod in the general industry to make them work faster; what I'm telling you is there's no evidence to support that for these three books.  Either they didn't as we have no evidence to support that notion, or they were very careful to use a lot of aloe and vitamin E to hide the burn marks.

TheMilford wrote:A TSR or RH production coordinator can tell us...

Well, we've got ex-TSR employees about if anyone wants to ask 'em...  However, I would think going to Random House is barking up the wrong tree.  We're discussing the 3rd/4th printings of the PHB, approximately Q1 1979.  RH wasn't in the picture until about a year later, Q4 1979 to Q1 1980.

For the record I try to be nice much of the time, but I also take this stuff seriously -- perhaps too seriously.  Where possible I try to base my findings on direct observation, and then add further conjecture based on those observations.  Very rarely do I pull something out completely out of a hat.

It seemed like you were hand-waving a good chunk of the information I had spent many hours investigating based on a high-level view of "what happens in the printing industry". I have no problem adjusting a hypothesis to incorporate new data, but it's not a sound research methodology to consider common practices, best practices or anecdotal reports as data.  They are essentially hearsay as we can't independently confirm such reports.  (Though they can be somewhat useful in confirming other more solidly evidenced data points.)

We've actually used such "sources" in the past, including Gary's own decades-old memories of events, and such reports tend to be generally accurate but specifically inaccurate.  For the most part, if we want reliable printing chronologies we've got to work with what we can discover within the books and/or deduce from the books.  

(I suppose I was also overly crotchety after staring at PHBs for hours, as that sort of thing will drive a person insane.  For that I apologize.)