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Condition Grading

The short answer. Booksellers grade on a six-step ladder — Fine, Near Fine, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor — and the book and its dust jacket are graded separately, written as book/jacket. The trap is at the bottom of the middle: Good does not mean good. It means a complete but noticeably worn reading copy, two full steps below what most people picture.

The jacket carries most of the value on a twentieth-century first, and most of the damage. It is graded separately from the book.

The ladder

These definitions descend from the standard codified by AB Bookman's Weekly and carried on by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. Most reputable dealers work to them.

Grade	What it means
Fine `F`	As new, or as close as makes no difference. Any deficiency at all is specifically named in the description.
Near Fine `NF`	Modestly handled, no significant defects, generally showing light shelf wear.
Very Good `VG`	A decently preserved copy with average wear. This is a perfectly respectable grade and the most common one for a collectable book.
Good `G`	Typically a reading copy: complete and basically intact, but with moderate wear throughout.
Fair `Fr`	Significantly worn, with compromising defects. Still complete. Acceptable as a reading or reference copy only.
Poor `Pr`	Missing leaves or plates, detached covers, or similar. Not normally offered for sale unless the title is scarce enough to justify it.

Many dealers add + and − within a grade — VG+ sits at the top of Very Good and is nearly Near Fine, VG− sits at the bottom and is nearly Good.

Good is the trap. In ordinary English "good" is praise. In bookselling it is the fourth rung down and describes a copy that is worn but still holding together. A listing that says "Good condition!" enthusiastically is usually written by someone who has not read the ladder — which is a reason to ask for photographs, not a reason to assume bad faith.

The two-part notation

Because the jacket carries so much of the value, it gets its own grade. Dealers write the pair separated by a slash, book first.

A single grade with no slash usually means there is no jacket — worth asking about explicitly rather than assuming.

Why the jacket dominates

For most first editions published after about 1920, the jacket is not packaging — it is the majority of the object's value. The working rule across the trade is that a jacket in condition comparable to the book accounts for something like 80–90% of what the copy is worth, and the same book without one may fetch only 10–20% of the jacketed price. The gap widens further for scarce jackets on older books.

That is why VG/G and G/VG are very different propositions despite using the same two letters, and why "no dust jacket" belongs in the first line of any honest description.

A price-clipped jacket — the corner of the front flap cut away, usually to hide the price before giving the book as a gift — is a real reduction in value but a modest one, and it is not evidence of a book-club copy. Book-club jackets generally carried no printed price at all. That difference is covered in How to Spot a Book Club Edition.

The vocabulary of defects

Dealers describe damage in a specific and fairly stable set of terms.

Term	What it describes
Foxing	Brown speckling of the paper, caused by a chemical reaction in the sheet.
Sunning	Fading from light exposure. Most often the spine, which faces out on the shelf.
Tanning	Age browning of the paper. Confined to the page edges it is called edge tanning.
Offsetting	Uneven discolouration transferred by prolonged contact — a bookmark, a newspaper clipping, an old adhesive.
Chipping	Small pieces broken away, usually from the head or foot of a jacket.
Closed tear	A tear with no paper missing. Materially better than an open tear, and worth distinguishing.
Rubbing	Surface wear from friction, typically along edges and corners.
Bumped	Corners or spine ends knocked out of shape by a drop or careless shelving.
Cocked	The spine no longer square to the text block, from being stored leaning rather than upright.
Remainder mark	A stamp or marker stripe, usually on the bottom edge, applied by the publisher to unsold stock.
Ex-library	Formerly in circulation in a library: stamps, pockets, spine labels. A steep discount.

An owner's inscription is a defect; an author's inscription is usually the opposite, and can be worth a multiple of the book. The two are not always easy to tell apart, and dealers price the difference on evidence rather than handwriting alone.

Worth checking

Condition is step seven of the first edition checklist, and it is the step that moves the number most. Once you know the grade, the free lookup shows what comparable copies are actually listed for.

Grading comes after identification, and the page identification is run on is the one we annotated as Anatomy of a First Edition.

Identification guidance only. Not an appraisal, and not legal advice. Where a point is not well documented for a given title, treat it as unverified rather than assuming.