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One of the things I am doing recently is attempting to organise my games room a little bit and bring some order within. It occurs to me I have an awful lot of 40K codexes, stretching from 2nd Edition right the way through to 8th with no immediate and obvious way of telling what edition they belong to. Obviously, the 2nd Ed ones are easy to distinguish and probably the 3rd Ed ones too but then it starts getting a little more complicated plus GW don't put any identifying notes in the flyleaf, not even for codexes that have been republished or updated twice in the same edition.

Question is, is there a simple and easy way to identify edition? Or is it simply a case of eyeballing the cover and trying to match to images from Lexicanum's 'Codex & Editions' page?

Are there any one-stop resources that can help with this process?

In early editions a codex might last more than 1 edition. The easiest way to categorize codex editions is sort them by the publication date (you will likely find it on the inside cover near the International Book Number) And then compare it to the publication date of the Rulebooks. For example all Codex's published after the 4th edition Rulebook, but before the 5th edition Rulebook would be 4th edition codex's.

Well it's easy to sift out the 9e by the Warhammer logo.
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Codex-Space-Marines-EN-2020

THIS is an 8e:
https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Codex-Astra-Militarum-hb-2017-eng
You can tell by the silver frame around the picture.

7e: A lot of the art on 7e (and 6th if the force didn't get a 7e book) was re-used on 8th. But these lack the silver picture frame.

6e - ? Check the publication date. Should be about 2012-2014 I think.

Don't have to worry about 9th Ed as I haven't got any of those - I stopped with 8th

Does confirm a little of my fears though, that I will have to do it by publication date and/or cover art/styles. One can only hope that GW are consistent with their cover styles/formats throughout the lifetime of a given edition though.

 filbert wrote:
One can only hope that GW are consistent with their cover styles/formats throughout the lifetime of a given edition though.

Mostly, they were. 3rd edition changed style completely halfway through.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Codex:_Necrons_(5th_Edition)

Look through codices and compare cover art.

That's how we're doing it, when we return to 40k, using 6th ed.
There were no publication dates in the books we looked in.

 filbert wrote:
...stretching from 2nd Edition right the way through to 8th with no immediate and obvious way of telling what edition they belong to

Some factions had the same book from 3rd to 5th, others had two books in one edition. Ultimately all you can do is check a list like wikipedia for which books were released when and then compare covers/contents against another reference.

 filbert wrote:
Don't have to worry about 9th Ed as I haven't got any of those - I stopped with 8th

Does confirm a little of my fears though, that I will have to do it by publication date and/or cover art/styles. One can only hope that GW are consistent with their cover styles/formats throughout the lifetime of a given edition though.

You can also generally ask the community and get fairly correct answers. And as folks have said, some armies were stuck with the same codex for multiple editions.

There's an illustrated list on Lexicanum:

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Codices_(List)

If there's no codex for a particular faction in any given edition, then they still used the one from the previous edition (or that faction didn't have their own book at that point).

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
If there's no codex for a particular faction in any given edition, then they still used the one from the previous edition (or that faction didn't have their own book at that point).

There were a few white dwarf or chapter approved lists not shown here, particularly early on - though they do have the sisters 5th edition white dwarf rules.
Examples include the 2nd edition necrons and 3rd edition sisters of battle (pre witch hunters).

There is at least one book missing as well - the 2nd edition Dark Millennium book which included rules for the grey knights.