How Can You Tell a First Printing of Blame!?

Kodansha’s tankobon carry a colophon page at the back with the book’s printing history: title, author, publisher, the date of the first printing and the impression number of the copy in hand. A true first printing of any Blame! volume is the copy whose colophon shows the first impression line against the volume’s release date. Everything else, the cover, the ISBN, the obi, stays identical across impressions, which is why photographs of the front of a Blame! volume can never prove a first printing on their own.

What the front of the book can do is identify the edition. The original Afternoon KC printings carry the ten ISBNs in the table below, printed in their era’s ISBN-10 form on early copies. One volume breaks the pattern in a documented way: volume 7 was issued in 2001 both as the standard edition and as a limited edition with its own ISBN, so a volume 7 with the 336 code is not an error, it is the limited pressing.