October 3, 2006: Time Flies When You're Having Fun

We just had an incident that brought home how long we've been doing this game-publishing stuff.

I'm pulling together a stack of representative GURPS books to ship to Lucca for the exhibit at the comic fair. They want publication dates. I'm all for that. They'll have good bibliographical labels.

Except . . . even though we do keep archive copies, and our print buying records go back for decades, sometimes we don't have a copy of every single printing of a book. And sometimes you open up a print buying folder and find that apparently it was last referenced by hamsters. At least, that's the best explanation for the every-which-way-and-backwards state of some of the files. Actually, most of them are darn good, but Murphy says that the one you want will be the one that got hamsterized.

So we just spent the last 45 minutes trying to figure out whether the first printing of the third edition of GURPS was in 1988 or 1989. It was one or the other . . . Okay. Monica finally nailed it. 1988. The first printing had the cover with the type in silver ink.
-- Steve Jackson

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