I haven't been following the debates about series, so I thought I should check here: surely the Aeneid isn't a series?

I certainly wouldn't have thought so. What books are listed as part of that "series"?

Basically any that consist of only a part of the work:

* Aeneidos: Liber Primus by Virgil (01)
* Aeneidos: Liber Secundus by Virgil (02)
* Aeneid, book 3 by Virgil (03)
* Aeneid, book 4 by Virgil (04)
* Aeneid, book 5 by Virgil (05)
* Aeneid, book 6 by Virgil (06)
* Aeneid, book 7 by Virgil (07)
* Aeneid, book 8 by Virgil (08)
* Aeneid, book 9 by Virgil (09)
* Aeneid, book 10 by Virgil (10)
* Aeneid, book 11 by Virgil (11)
* Aeneid, book 12 by Virgil (12)
* Aeneis 1/2. by Vergil (omnibus 01-02)
* Vergil's Gedichte (Zweites Bändchen: Aeneide Buch I-VI) by Vergil (omnibus 01-06)
* Virgil, I, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6, Revised Edition by Virgil (omnibus 01-06)
* Aeneis 3/4. by Vergil (omnibus 03-04)
* Aeneis 5/6. 5. und 6. Buch. by Vergil (omnibus 05-06)
* Aeneis 7/8. 7. und 8. Buch. by Vergil (omnibus 07-08)
* Virgil Aeneid 7-12 by Virgil (omnibus 07-12)
* Virgil, Volume II : Aeneid Books 7-12, Appendix Vergiliana (Loeb Classical Library, No 64) by Virgil (omnibus 07-12)
* Aeneis 9/10 by Vergil (omnibus 09-10)
* Aeneis 11/12 by Vergil (omnibus 11-12)

That's just nuts.

There are a lot of instances of these - and they've been permitted to stay throughout. I have foreign editions of Stephen King works that are broken into three-part volumes that are "series" as well.

Now for the paradigm shift - I received that book as a single volume, of course I know it's not a series. But wait - that's the way that book was presented and is the only way it's really known to those individuals!

To those that receive the books in that form, it is a series. This is the way they can view the volumes all at once. In that case, it's actually rather interesting.

It's not nuts and it's not wrong from that user's perspective. It's not like they decided to take the Aeneid and combine it with dissimilar works to make a fake series, right?

#3

Oh, god. Reminds me why I avoid looking at the blasted page. What next, books "serialised" by chapters? Please remove that.

From the What isn't a series? guideline section:

A good rule of thumb is that series have a conventional name and are intentional creations, on the part of the author or publisher.

It was serialized by a publisher.

You going to kick this one out too because a publisher released a single volume?

http://www.librarything.com/series/From+...

Tell me, how was the first one published for The Aeneid? You might want to check it out (and look into why they call the various parts "books").

#7

Guidelines: we don't list publisher's "series" unless they are a product unique to the publisher. Moreover, remember that not everything that is published serially is therefore a "series"--think of Dickens', Dostoevsky's serialised novels.

As for the Aeneid, I wonder if you read it (I did--in Latin, incidentally). It is an organic whole, an epic poem in whose case the designation "liber" approximately fits the designation "canto" or "chapter" or "fit" or "part" or...

You might want to check it out.

I'll ask again, I'd like to know the harm. Your notes on Victorian Literature and reading in the original Latin have been duly noted.

I'd like to know what the harm is - there's a series of books that make up a whole. Most of which are less than 40 volumes, save the two part omnibuses that make up the main two-part volumes most individuals would have (where it seems most people own part 1 and not part 2).

What is the harm of this series. That many publishers clearly made. The point is that is another view of a work. This person has not randomly chopped up a whole work and made a fake breaks and works to make their series. They've taken actual books and arranged them into a series.

Do you think that these publisher did not intend to sell the entire series? Do you think that they don't call them a series? Do you think that they hope that they sell #4 and #11 and none of the others?

That many publishers clearly made.

This is the problem. If it were the work of a single publisher, the Oxford Commentaries on the Aeneid or something, I could see calling that a series. But the "works" in the series are composed of all sorts of different publications, with all sorts of different content.

They haven't just cut up a work and published it in separate volumes. A "book" of the Aeneid consists of maybe 30 pages of text. It doesn't really make sense to talk about the "original publication", because the volumes that modern publishers put out are 90% something else.

And, yet, there's organized chaos.

The Aeneid does come in 12 books - no matter how you really cut it. So if you get a single book or two-volume set, you're going to get 12 "books."

So the series has a core series in there that's clearly cut into the 12 books. And then they've got the more a-typical part one and two that's taking parts 1-6 and 7-12. From there, they've mixed in a single publisher that likes doing two books at a time. They're actually being inclusive - and they left rather excellent notations.

Persepolis follows the same issue - in different countries, it's cut up differently:

http://www.librarything.com/series/Perse...

Do we cut this one out because publishers disagreed on how to publish it? This isn't the only example, but it's a more modern one - and it goes to show that the issue isn't going to disappear.

>11 Do the different versions of Persepolis have vastly different content?

I'm not sure how the fact that other series have similar issues implies that when in doubt, everything should be a series.

#9

You're stuck on the erroneous idea of what a "book"--specifically, a "liber" within the Aeneid, corresponds to. The above isn't even a single uniform edition, containing as it does random volumes of different editions with different subsets of parts (and at least one volume including the Eclogues and the Georgics). It's ludicrous we're even discussing this.

I'll only point out--again--that, according to the guidelines, we do not enter non-unique publishers' series.

I've no more time for this nonsense.

P.S. Oops, repeated Zoe's #10, basically. Sorry, didn't read through, gotta go, later-or not.

Well, now I'm confused...

Because this is not what the original claim was - the original claim was basically "oh-hell-to-the no!" and "what next, chapters?" At this point, it appears that I'm being told that there are some terrible combining errors of some kind - or that we know some publishers have eschewed the traditional books of the Aeneid for their own purposes?

ETA

>13 - That rule that you're quoting would apply if, say, this were part of an "Epic Poems of the World" series a publisher had put together. Those are the strictly verboten publisher series. This is an encapsulated work.

Again, I'd love to know the harm.

Message edited by its author, May 27, 2009, 3:01pm.

On the series page, we have the following rule: If it doesn't fit one of those qualifications, but it's still consistently referred to as a distinct, non-edition-based series by all booksellers and publishers and critics, list it anyway. I wonder whether it would be useful to have a similar but opposite rule: if it seems to fit the stated criteria of a series, but is obviously not a series, don't list it. There has to be room for common sense somewhere.

The harm in one individual case is just that it's annoying to see a non-series listed as a series. But if this were taken as precedent and every ancient work too large to fit on a single papyrus roll were listed as a series, then my entire series page would be overrun with non-series and would become useless.

Reference was made to chapters because, as I stated earlier, a "book" of the Aeneid is about 30 pages long. If a division like this makes a series, then individual chapters of other books would also be series.

Plus, modern publishers tend not to publish volumes that are only 30 pages long. Instead, the volumes listed on the series page are filled with other content, like commentaries or vocabulary lists. The "core" that supposedly makes them a series is maybe 10 or 15 percent of the content.

It's not a terrible combining error, though; I think it's fairly standard practice to "give up" and lump together works like that that can't be distinguished based on the title alone. But this obviously isn't an ideal state of affairs; personally, I'd rather not have them all lumped together as one work.