Slip cancellation in 1904

Below are some images of one of my books with a cancelled imprint—The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus on the Magnet A.D. 1269, translated by Brother Arnold, and with an Introductory Note by Brother Potamian (New York, 1904).* (For my previous posts concerning cancellation, see here.)

There are three copies of this edition of The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus available to buy at present: all record the imprint as “McGraw-Hill.” As you can see, however, the printed imprint is “McGraw Publishing Company.”

But you can also see that my copy (and, I assume, the ones for sale) have a nicely printed slip bound in that covers the imprint, which states that the book was published by the “McGraw-Hill Book Company … successors to Book Departments of the McGraw Publishing Company [and the] Hill Publishing Company.”

There is a copy on the Internet Archive (here https://archive.org/details/letterofpetrusp00pieriala) that does not have this printed cancellation slip, so it is unclear whether all copies have the slip-cancel. Which raises an interesting question: how should the imprint be recorded: “McGraw Publishing Company” or “McGraw-Hill Book Company”?**

While looking at this book again I noticed something else—which the astute reader may also have noticed—it has a page number on the title-page! It also has one on the verso of the title leaf, on the imprint page, as well as the half-title, part-titles etc.

Conventionally, these pages do not have page numbers on them. It would be interesting to know whether other publications by McGraw consistently included printed pagination in this way, or whether this was a one-off—an accidental oversight effecting just this book, bought on by the disruption of amalgamation.


*BTW: Wikipedia informs me (here) that the AKAs for Petrus Peregrinus, Brother Arnold and Brother Potamian are: Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt, Joseph Charles Mertens and M. F. O’Reilly.

**The answer from WorldCat (here)—or the overwhelming majority of its subscriber-libraries—is “Norderstedt Hansebooks GmbH 2018”! The main entry for The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus (with 171 copies in “all 9 editions”) has this imprint. Under this main entry you can insist on only seeing “just this [print-on-demand] edition,” but not just one of the other 8 editions, one or two of which are the real one. A secondary WorldCat entry with the imprint as I gave it at the head of this post (“New York, 1904”) has only one holding in Denmark. Three cheers for the Danes, for getting it right.