Pray, tell us what would you consider to be the most ubiquitous yet unsung feature of the book-trade? Time’s up. From the blog over at Quercus Books, publishers of the gazillion-selling trilogy by Stieg Larsson comes this informative post about the International Standard Book Number or ISBN. In a description rich with acronyms (not for the abbreviationally-challenged, I might hasten to add), we learn of the ISBN’s humble origins stemming from a report entitled ‘Standard Numbering in the Book Trade’ (1966) by Gordon Foster, professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, which concluded “that there is a clear need for the introduction of standard numbering, and that substantial benefits will accrue to all parties therefrom.”

Despite the claims to standardization, this system is not without its quite distinct quirks , especially when it comes to clues about the origin of a particular book. A hint: “the code for English-speaking countries is always 0 or 1, yet for more obscure areas it can reach up to five digits in length (Qatars is 99921!).”

This is the beginnings of the story about how we got to that baffling pattern of stripes and numbers that most people who buy books hardly, if ever, pay any attention to. Now if only someone could explain to us the origins of the bar-code!