How to sort search result in reverse order of publication date in Google books?

Google books provide sorted by date option on the left column to sort searched books. But the result seems that publication date is in descending order ( from latest to oldest). This may not be fit for finding the oldest if there are thousands of search results. How can I quickly locate the oldest book (开发者_运维百科publication date is the oldest)? Thanks in advance.

There is currently no way simple way to sort by date in ascending order in Google Books. You can work around this by choosing "Custom Range" and trying out end dates until you get only 1 page of results. Unfortunately, you're still likely to run into the problem that many of the books that Google thinks were published a long time ago are actually metadata errors.