Printed price to determine date

I would think that in most cases, the higher priced items are later, but for UK books, on at least one edition of The Lord of the Rings, http://www.tolkienbooks.net/php/details.php?reference=45450, the price was cheaper for a later edition, so does not always hold true.

It's difficult to know what went on with that one-volume LR (and I can't think now why I didn't give it a separate entry when the imprint changed from George Allen & Unwin to Unwin Paperbacks, as it was clearly meant to be a new edition in the publishing sense, though most of the type remained the same).

Christina and I don't have what tolkienbooks.net is calling the first state of the first impression (1978) of the Unwin Paperbacks edition, but our 16th impression (1976) of the one-volume paperback has the same cover points, including the price £3.95.

We do have a first impression (1978) with the same (Baynes) cover, now with the Unwin Paperbacks device, with a printed price on the lower cover of £5.50, and also a first impression (1978) with the film tie-in cover, with the price £2.95. I think it's a good guess that the lower price was to encourage sales, building on film publicity. Our copy of this impression with a higher price is clearly narrower, which suggests that unsold copies of the first impression were later stripped and re-covered, then trimmed at the fore-edge.

We have a third impression (1979) with the film tie-in cover, with a sticker with $9.95, evidently for sale in Canada, affixed over the price panel on the lower cover; but also a copy of the same impression, not trimmed, in the Baynes cover and priced at £4.95.

Wayne