Advance reading copy (uncorrected proof)

How to read it

The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) defines an ARC, an advance review, reader’s or reading copy, as a special pre-publication copy that publishers send to reviewers and editors before the publication date. ARCs are usually bound in soft wrappers. The wrappers may look like the jacket art of the first trade edition, but more often carry only printed text, and some ARCs are hardcovers with the publisher’s review slip laid in. An uncorrected proof, in IOBA’s glossary, is a pre-publication printing made for editorial use and occasionally sent out for review, usually in plain coloured wrappers. The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) adds that an advance copy may be in a different format from the published book, and may or may not be bound.

Also searched as: advance reader copy, advance reading copy, advance review copy, ARC, bound proof, galley, not for resale book, uncorrected proof.

Who the copies were for

John Carter and Nicolas Barker, in ABC for Book Collectors, describe publishers sending advance copies of a new book to reviewers, chosen booksellers and the judges of book clubs, besides the copies their own travellers used to take orders from the trade. Such copies are normally either final proofs or the first sheets gathered from the main print run, often put up in plain or printed wrappers.

Proofs, advance copies and review copies

The words on the cover come from different stages. Carter and Barker explain that first proofs are printed for the author to correct and the publisher to check. Publishers used to order revised or final proofs in quantity, stitched and wrappered, for the office and for promoting the book; printed and gathered sheets in the same kind of wrapper have taken their place. Carter and Barker call the distinction between wrappered final proofs and advance copies significant to bibliographers, but say the physical differences are often slight or non-existent. A review copy, in IOBA’s terms, is different again: a copy of the new book sent free for review, often with a review slip laid in. IOBA notes it is not necessarily a first edition.

Is an advance copy a first edition?

No, in Carter and Barker’s account. Advance copies are an early state of the printed text, and copies that differ from the published edition, in text or binding, interest collectors; IOBA notes that ARCs occasionally differ in text from the first edition. But Carter and Barker say advance copies do not represent a first or early issue in the proper sense, and that fifty advance copies can’t affect the firstness of the first edition as issued on the day of publication. That edition is the one a first edition statement or a Number line (printer’s key) refers to.

“Not for resale”

The words are the publisher’s. In 2021 Shelf Awareness quoted Sarita Varma, director of publicity at Farrar, Straus and Giroux: FSG’s policy does not condone any reselling of advance reader copies, and each copy clearly indicates that it is not for resale.

Slips and stamps on review copies

Carter and Barker trace how review copies have been marked. In the 19th century it was sometimes a written note on the endpaper or fly-leaf, sometimes a printed slip loosely inserted, the earliest they know of from 1834; the slip is almost universal today. Some early 20th-century publishers stamped copies for review instead, with an inked, perforated or blind stamp, usually on the title page. Some collectors regard that stamp as a defacement, like a library stamp; others accept it as evidence that the copy is an early one.