Price Code.

I was scrolling down Facebook recently when I saw a post about scoring a copy of a book called Chamberpot and Motherfuck, and needless to say I dropped everything and investigated. I found a review by Nicholas Poole-Wilson (The Library, 19.1 [March 2018]: 94–96) of Chamberpot & Motherfuck: The Price-Codes of the Book Trade, by Exhumation [i.e. Ian Jackson], 2nd ed.; it’s behind a paywall, but the extract they allow you to read is worth posting on its own: Every trade is also a tribe, booksellers no exception, and one way that a mercantile tribe signals membership is by language and price symbols, that is to say the cost or price code. Here are codes aplenty, 226 plus another eighteen in a sheet of Addenda, the total twice as many as the number in Ian Jackson’s earlier edition of 2010. The codes, ancient and modern, are presented with accompanying commentary in an attempt to combat the bibliographical neglect of their study. Roger Stoddard in his Marks in Books (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)…