Oh wow. This used book I ordered from Biblio arrived with a BINC sticker on it!
I haven’t even seen one of these for well over a decade and I haven’t had to know what any of it means since 2002, but here’s what I can still tell you:
- 6465638 is the BINC number, which was Borders’ internal SKU system. They were assigned sequentially, so the lower the number, the longer that edition had been in the company’s inventory.
- “Poetry” is the shelving code; that determined where the books was physically shelved in the store.
- 2231 is the subject code; they were sort of like the Dewey system, with each digit representing a subcategory of the preceding digit. The 2000s were all of fiction/lit, the 2200s were poetry, etc.
- “078…” is the ISBN.
- 60909 was the invoice date for this particular copy, meaning it was added to the store’s inventory on June 9, 2009. That “1” off by itself above and to the right of the invoice date is how many copies of this book were on the invoice.
- 22 is the store number. At one point, I could have told you what store that was, but that information is gone from my brain (although I still do remember a few of them). Those numbers were also assigned sequentially, so the lower the number, the longer the store had been around. My store (Beachwood, OH) was 28.
- W 7 KB was warehouse sorting info.
All of which reminds me how much I enjoyed working at that bookstore. There were tough days to be sure and the pay sucked, but back in the late 1990s, it really was a special place.
I will also note that, to this day, when I have work-related stress dreams, they nearly always take place in the bookstore.