Talk:Cover date

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Removed[edit]

I've just removed the following, which appears to be vandalism / a joke:

One of the exceptions to the rule was the now-defunct History Today magazine, which was actually dated three months behind.

Shame, though - the idea of a historical history magazine whose issues were always out of date is rather wonderful... - IMSoP (talk) 00:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Marvel Comics, 1989[edit]

In 1989, Marvel Comics changed its cover-dating system. Most Marvel Comics had 14 issues bearing a 1989 cover date. They each had two additional issues, dated Mid-November and Mid-December.

TRANSFORMERS (1984-1991 series)
48, January, 1989
49, February
50, March
51, April
52, May
53, June
54, July
55, August
56, September
57, October
58, November
59, Mid-November
60, December
61, Mid-December

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeff39212 (talk • contribs) 16:03, 8 April 2008

This is not a cover-dating issue; rather, this is a publication-frequency issue, so there's no need to cover this in the article. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s (this was not restricted to just 1989; it was common throughout the entire period of the late 1980s and early 1990s; some titles also had more than 14 issues, as many as 15 or 16, in one year), both Marvel and DC experimented with departing from a strictly monthly publication schedule, so that some months of the year they put out more than one issue per month. —Lowellian (reply) 07:24, 1 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Belated comment but that's wrong. The bimonthlies were cover dated "Early Month" and "Late Month". The "Mid Month" was a strategy to cut the gap between publication and cover dates. Thans to the direct market dominating the industry the gap was now up to four months. Timrollpickering (talk) 22:04, 29 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

False Publication Dates[edit]

In contrast to legal manuals, which may have statements at the front that they represent the law as it was up to a certain specified date, academic textbooks, especially those aimed at American colleges, may be issued with the following year's date on the title page: which may mislead those considering buying them the next year.

A more extreme case of misrepresentation is the Indian publishers who, when reprinting out-of-copyright books, even from the nineteenth century, cut out the original publication date from the title page and the end of the preface, and substitute what can only be the date of reprinting. Such a mislabelled book may still be of use, but the unwary reader is misled as to the recency of the scholarship.

Modern photographic reprints may be guilty of the same misrepresentation when it comes to advertising on-line: only the date of printing of the current edition is given, and not the original publication date. Print-on-demand publishers, whether they are reprinting old or new works, may do the same.

Among newspapers, I used to think that Le Monde had a surprisingly fast distribution network, as it seemed to appear on Edinburgh news-stands a day before Le Figaro, until I learned from Wikipedia that it was printed at mid-day in Paris with the following day's date on the masthead.

A different purpose was served by the fake newspaper, possibly the Evening News, that a television programme revealed some decades ago was being printed daily or weekly with identical content except for the date so that a single copy could be delivered to the Britsh Library. This was in some way protecting the rights of the owners of the title. NRPanikker (talk) 13:16, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]