Quick question - looking to see what the majority thinks. Are hymnals like textbooks where all the editions should be combined? Or should they be treated like individual works, since the selection of hymns differs? Thanks for your thoughts!

Do you mean is a Lutheran Hymnal the same as a Baptist Hymnal - that's an absolutely not.

Even on updates, I'd vote to be careful and likely keep them separate unless you really know for sure it was just a low-key update. There could have been an official Church Congress proclamation/vote that led to major changes in Hymnals and other official texts. In those cases, pre-congressional change hymnals will hold some significant social value in having them separate.

Full Disclosure: I tend to be extremely cautious with religious texts of any kind - especially since there are things like Church Congresses where things that look minor to the outside world are huge in that world.

Lutheran hymnals - definitely not. They only put out an edition every 50 years or so and then it's usually because there was some profound difference in the church itself. Congregations have split over the color of their hymnals (which is about as much social difference as you can get without having a war)

Some other churches, like the Catholic Church, now have paperback hymnals which get issued more frequently. Maybe some of those could be combined. But I'd say if you don't know the two editions intimately and their effect (or non-effect) on the church that uses them, don't combine them.

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Congregations have split over the color of their hymnals

Seriously?

I've got a lot of hymnals in my library, including ones that could be considered edition variants: approved by the same church body at different dates. But they shouldn't be combined! Until pretty recently, revising a hymnal was so expensive and difficult that it was seldom done and only with significant changes, as aulsmith notes for Lutherans.

Hymnals can only be used together if the hymn numbers match. I would make that the decisive issue.

Like the German Lutheran hymnal "Evangelisches Gesangbuch" has significantly different editions for the different German states (Länder) – but fortunately each with unique ISBN. So there would be no question of combining there.

Well, not auto-combining probably - but I could see how somebody trying to be helpful could combine those.

4: Well, the actual arguments were deeper than the hymnal, but they all came to a head when congregations had to choose between the ever-so-slightly-more-liberal green hymnal and the conservative blue hymnal. It was an interesting time.

Thanks for all your input. That's pretty much how I feel about it, but wanted to make sure before I split out different editions of the LDS Hymnal. Love Combiners!

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Oh, well, that makes a bit more sense, then!

Hmm. I think hymnals should be treated the same as any anthology. Which is to say, different editions of the same hymnal should, under current rules, be combined. (Obviously, different *hymnals* should not be combined -- the Lutheran is not the same as the Methodist, etc.)

Now, I see that it would be annoying to have the 1960 hymnal combined with the 1980 hymnal. But as I understand it, that's the rule with anthologies (e.g., the current combined Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume I which contains multiple different editions). FWIW I would rather have separate editions be separate works.

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2009, 11:11am.

It's not always easy to determine what constitutes a "different edition". Hymns Ancient and Modern is quite a different collection from Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised and Hymns Ancient and Modern New Standard, and I'd certainly split them.

12> We have the cases where some old work, I can't remember any particular examples, is printed along with a short story. In that case it is *not* combined with the same work without the short story or with a different short story.

I also remember discussions about Norton editions of works that include essays about the work and there being considerable support behind combining those with the work by itself because some people don't consider the essays to be works by themselves, more akin to introductions.

You Norton anthology though I wouldn't consider in the same category as those other Nortons since it's composed of many different actual works and the actualy works change between editions (they do, don't they). So I don't think the anthologies should be combined. This may be an overzealous application of the rule (well more of a guideline) for Norton editions.

As I understand it, the underlying rule that "rules them all" is "Does it have a social difference". Since almost none of us have read our Norton's cover to cover, socially they generally mean that we took English or American Lit 101 and 102 sometime, so there isn't a whole lot of social difference.

Different hymnal editions can have a lot of social difference, as explained above. If you know the hymnal well enough to know it doesn't, combining seems reasonable as it brings together people who all have some edition of that hymnal. But if there is a social difference, and perhaps the people owning different editions aren't speaking to each other, combining is unhelpful. If you don't know, then don't do it.

15>

That sounds extremely reasonable, but very similar arguments ("Do people who know the difference think it makes a difference") don't carry a lot of weight generally (which still boggles me); still, if it really is the "congregations break over this" that's a somewhat more powerful argument.

Part of the difference between hymnals and textbooks is that the time between editions is so long. Most textbooks update every few years. Hymnals update every few decades.