KFE <--> kfe

While IDEO held a conference on "100 years of the Cairo Edition" without having a single copy ‒ either of the 1924 edition by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād nor the 1952 one by aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ & colleagues, neither a big one, nor a small one, not even a version by a commer­cial or foreign publisher, just a 1971 print of the 1952 text on 548 pages with 15 lines.
Both the Berlin Staatsbiblothek

and Muhammad Hozien

have severval copies.
top image: editions of 1924/5 and 1927, below: both from 1952.

While the Staatsbibliothek was just lucky (getting an intact copy of 1952 with the de­dication to King Fuʾād [from East-Berlin] and one in which the republican book­seller had torn out the page [from West-Berlin]), Muhammad Hozien searched, because he knew that they are not just prints of the same.
1924 to 1952 it is fairly easy:
First comes KFE_1,
then kfe_a, kfe_b, kfe_c
‒ a succession, a development: each edition builds on the earlier one.
When exactely these four editions were published I do not know:
the problem for KFE_1 is objective, for the small ones only subjective (I did not pay sufficient addention).
In all editions up to 1952 one can read:

Printing was finished 7. Ḏul Ḥigga 1342 (= 10.7. 1924).
I have a problem:
How can the book with that text inside know when its printing was finished?
Was it observing its own printing and taking the time?
I guess (!) that the date given was just the date planned,
and because they could not meet it, they de­cided to stamp the finished book with the real date:

The differences between the editions before 1952 are minor.
My main conclusion from studying the text of 1242/43:
it is not the result of year long committee discussions,
nor the appli­cation of what ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧǧāḥ have written about the rasm,
but a switch form Indian-Persian-Ottoman practise of writing the well established text of Ḥafṣ
to applying the African (Maġribian, Andalusian) rules (with­out clolour dots, too ex­pensice/com­plicated for printing at the time).
The text was written by the chief reader of Egypt, Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusai­nī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥad­dād (born 1282/1865) who knew the dif­ferences between Warš (of which he had a copy at hand) and Ḥafṣ by heart.
After he had died on 22.1.1939, ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ be­came chief reciter of the qurʾān. He chaired a commi­ttee to revise the written text. Apart of one clear mistake (the spelling of /kalimat/ in 7:137), some minor corrections, the elimina­tion of infor­mation on the chrono­logy in the sura title boxes, the inclusion of the basmalla in continu­ous reading (which leads to some changes at the end of suras)

and about 800 changes in pause signs were decreed ‒ decreed, not made, because the changes were only made in the large editions, for which new plates were manu­factured. For the small editions old plates were used, and here some changes were just not made, others by hand. Only the changes in tanwin were all made. (on the image in the middle from the 1954 small edition the sura title box is the old one and the mīm added by hand
below from the Tash­kent 1960 reprint.)
so we have: KFE_1   less than 1000 changges   in KFE_2 /2a
but: kfe_a /b /c less than 100 changes   in kfe_d
And the changes introduced in kfe_a, _b, _c are all gone in KFE_2
BECAUSE they never occured on the large plates ‒ existing plates were reused.

So, there are technical reasons for the content of the different editions.

While for the Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf, "the Šamarlī" and the Madina Editions
we have different sizes of the same content,
while we have huge runs of Madina Editions, hence fresh plates (almost) evey year,
the runs of King Fuʾād Editions were low, so low that some of the 1924 plates were used until the end, and some of the first small plates from the next year to the end.

­‒