How Can You Tell a First Printing of Fairy Tail?
Turn to the last page: the colophon knows, the cover does not say.
Japanese manga do not print “first edition” on their covers. For a Kodansha tankōbon like Fairy Tail, the printing history lives on the colophon page at the back of the book, where each impression is dated and numbered as it is printed. A first printing is simply the impression whose colophon records the first one.
This page sets out the method that applies to every volume of the series, with volume 1, the December 2006 book every collector wants in its first impression, as the worked example.
READING A KODANSHA COLOPHON
The back page decidesWhere to look
Every Japanese tankōbon ends with a colophon page, the okudzuke, printed with the book's publication data: title, author, publisher, the printing's date, and its printing number. That page, not the cover, is where a first printing identifies itself.
What a first printing says
A first printing's colophon records the first impression: the issue date matching the volume's release date, and the printing line reading as the first printing (第1刷). Later impressions keep the same ISBN and cover but advance the printing number and date, which is why the colophon is the only reliable test.
The ISBN cannot help you
All impressions of a Kodansha volume share one ISBN: volume 1 is 978-4-06-363771-7 in its first printing and its twentieth. A seller listing an ISBN has identified the book, not the printing.
Volume 1 as the worked example
For Fairy Tail volume 1, the first printing is the December 15, 2006 impression: its colophon carries that date as the first printing. Any copy whose colophon shows a later date or a higher printing number is a later impression of the same book, however clean it looks.
The obi question
First printings were sold wrapped in a printed obi band. Surviving obis are genuinely scarce, most were thrown away at purchase, so an obi can support a first-printing claim but never make one: the colophon makes it.