A question of policy and then a question of practicalities.

First: I'd like to separate out the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. Do people agree with me on this?

Second: Right now these are a mess. There are two main clumps of combined books. What's the best way of going about untangling these two editions? Should I uncombine all of them and then redo the appropriate ones?

Personally I don't agree with you at all but others have argued that there are sufficient differences between some editions to keep them separate. You just need to be aware that if you separate them someone else may well come along and re-combine them.

And, yes as far as I know you need to untangle book by book. There have been some recent changes in combining but I don't think they affect this.

I'm with GreyHead, don't agree at all that the 14th and 15th should be separated. Also, he's right that you'll just need to untangle book by book.

No, as long as the editions call themselves "Chicago manual of style", they are definitely the same book.

jacr - TIM's definition of a work is that: are the books socially different?

SO if there are really profound differences between a 14th ed and a 15th ed it would be correct to seperate them. If the differences are only minor, then they should remain combined. Most new editions DO remain combined.

Best bet is to seperate out individually each 14th ed, and re-combine them all together afterwards. IF IT IS required.

I'm surprised how definite many folks are on this post about combining these editions. One of the primary causes of combine/not combine debates is that some see the need for everyone with a common interest in a work be gathered together, while others see the need for everyone with the same text in hand be gathered together. As long as there is no way to make both type of combinations on the same work, the debate will continue.
I have an 1800s copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and and the latest (8th) edition as well. They are definitely not the same work - I'd estimate that less than half of the content in the lastest edition appears in the 1800s edition.
shmjay says 'No, as long as the editions call themselves "Chicago manual of style", they are definitely the same book.', which I would argue is incorrect relative to the term 'book' but is also often incorrect relative to the term 'work'. There is a reason that "15th Edition" is prominently displayed in large type on the cover of such works. There is often a big difference between editions dealing with language and language use (and that difference is important to its owners), but often little difference between two editions of the same novel.

O.

Let me explain my reasoning for separating the 14th and 15th editions.

First, there are major changes in the 15th edition--starting with an entirely new chapter on grammar--which make the book appeal to different audiences. Basically, there were people looking for a grammar guide who bought the 15th who would have no interest in the 14th.

Second, I think there's no question that, socially, there's a difference between the two most recent copies and any earlier edition. Earlier editions simply aren't useful anymore as style guides unless you're being deliberately archaic. They remain in libraries for other purposes--for archival purposes, or as part of a collection-for-collections-sake, or something like that. But maybe I'm wrong about where the cut-off is. Maybe it's the 13th ed. Maybe it's the 12th. But I know it comes before the facsimile edition of the 6th edition! It seems to me that the way to avoid this vagueness problem is to just separate out all the editions.

Finally, the social data I use primarily is how many others own the book. When I look at my collection that way, it doesn't really tell me anything that when included in the title is the 15th ed., since that's not my question.

That said, I don't want to do the uncombing and recombining if most others disagree. (I'm also not about to do it today regardless.) So I'll wait and see what other comments this thread attracts.

By the way, there's a similar issue with Fowler's Modern English, where original copies--by Fowler--are all mixed in with newer, re-edited versions, which are very different, but there then becomes a question about when do they become sufficiently different to justify a new work?

-jacr

Message edited by its author, Feb 19, 2007, 9:30am.

Well it is tricky and there are grey areas.

Your original copy, probably could be combined quite happily with a 2nd ed.

a 2nd ed could equally be happilly combined with a 3rd ed.

etc etc. till your original is then combined with the 8th ed. which doesn't seem so sensible if they are 50% different.

I'd probably say they are still the same work, but be less sure of it. When/if the metawork system arrives the original can be kept seperate from the 8th ed but still part of the same work.

I have the 14th edition here for the odd occasion when I need to look something up. So it's still a working reference book . . . maybe someday I'll get the 15th or 16th, but a new chapter on grammar isn't going to tempt me.

For my purposes the 14th is practically equivalent to the 15th or the 13th or the . . .

To take a more extreme example I happen to have my grand-father's fifth edition of 'Machinery's Handbook' here on the shelf - circa 1919. That has some sentimental value but I also use it - about as often as the Manual of Style - to look up useful information.

Interesting problem. The answer affects any number of reference works.

(e.g., GreyHead's 'Machinery's Handbook'; my own copies of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (two editions of which I inherited from my own father...); the Statistical Abstract of the United States (which might not load, because the various editions on LT AREN'T combined properly...).)

I think from the LT perspective of the "work", I lean toward combining ALL of the various editions of reference works: it's useful from the 'community' perspective to find other people with an interest in the topic.

I own a Chicago Manual of Style, but it's the 13th edition from my college days. That's an interesting datum, whether or not it's important enough to me to stay up-to-date with the current edition.

The Chicago Manual might be something of an outlier: I was surprised to see how widely held it is on LT. It's actually a common enough book that distinguishing the various editions of this particular book might make sense; but I think that the general case for reference books should be to combine editions.

(edited to fix a tag.)

Message edited by its author, Feb 19, 2007, 11:45am.

I brought this question up some time ago, as I have two editions of The Chicago Manual of Style -- the 13th and the 15th. I referred to information in the preface of the 15th edition:

"New sections have been added on preparing electronic publications . .. guidance on citing electronic works . . ." as well as the chapter on grammar and usage cited above

and

"The 12th edition, the most radically revised, was virtually a new book. The thirteenth and fourteenth continued to draw ideas from authors and editors, from responses to questionnaires, and from letters and telephone calls from (sometimes perplexed) readers. The present edition benefited not only from similar sources but also from a circle of advisers connected by e-mail, from a listserv for university press managing editors, and from the Q&A page in the University of Chicago Press's own Web Site."

If it were just me, I would group editions 1-11, and 12-14, and separate 15. But I think this is impractically complex for LT and that they will all have to remain grouped on the works page, however lovingly we separate them for ourselves.

Some food for thought http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchiv... .

The basic problem is that we have a binary solution to a fuzzy and subjective reality. There is no right answer, no same or different "essence," only what you want the system to do.

I favor combining them, because I favor the "dinner party test." If someone were to say—presumably while drunk—"The Chicago Manual of Style is my favorite book!" that person wouldn't mention the edition, nor would the person who chimed in "Oh, me too, with Words into Type a close second!" Once those two star-crossed book-lovers went off into a corner together the matter of editions might well come up, but in the initial social context the "common-sense" and social similarity is most important.

The "dinner party test", huh? (Perhaps better known as the "drunk" test....) That works.

Also at work here is the "NEW! IMPROVED!" syndrome, an effect that's sometimes nothing more than marketing hype.

Just because the publisher (who, after all, is NOT a disinterested observer here) breathlessly announces that their new! edition of say, A Spotter's Guide to the Annelids renders the old edition fit only for kindling - doesn't necessarily mean that it's literally true. I would take any publisher's description of with a grain of salt.

Look at textbooks - which are required to cover the same material, but which are sometimes reissued in "new" editions ONLY to generate new sales.

Reference works all have the same use - the information may evolve over time, but they all address the same need. Someone checking their copy of Peruvian Soil Reports - 1st edition is probably using it for the same purpose as someone checking the PSR - Revised 82nd edition.

(Yes, in some fields, old information may be worthless, but that the user's problem; and - in fast-changing fields - a problem that access to even the most current print edition might not prevent. Thus, Index Medicus is now mostly on-line.)

Message edited by its author, Feb 19, 2007, 2:04pm.

I'm new to combining, but I'm discovering things as I read posts. One is that the closer a poster is to the topic, the more likely s/he wants to separate editions.

I know I keep having to back away and resist separating too much. Right now I'm ignoring a strong urge to separate The Canterbury Tales in Modern English from the plain old Canterbury Tales since I know leaving them combined passes the dinner party test.

14> This is very true it is why Tim insists classics are different. for example. But socially I think the benefits of combining outweigh those of differentiation. looking at objectively Gurps 1st edition is a very different creature from the latest Chivalry & Sorcery but rather the opposite. The King James Bible very different from the NIV. a modern prose Beowulf very different from the original. but socially these people want to speak to each other. they want to be at the same dinner party. So if combining is something we do to add social value maybe we should be a bit less picky.

15>

I really do have to jump in here and say that I think Bible translations really do matter socially. Different denominations favor different translations, seriously. There is a big difference for many people between having the KJV and the New American Bible (a Catholic translation). I mean, this is one of the reasons there are many different translations, because of sectarian issues. I've known many Christians who were nothing like biblical scholars but who were really insistent about which translation you should be using and which you shouldn't.

12>

Actually, I suspect that were I to meet someone who claimed, at a dinner party, that his or her favorite book was the Chicago Manual, precisely my first question would be, "Which edition?" Surely someone who loved a style manual so much would have strong opinions about its editions!

I actually agree with rebeccanyc in message 11--both with her suggested solution and with the impossibility of actually implementing that solution.

As I said earlier, this seems like a vagueness question. To add to Tim's reading suggestion, see this: http://crookedtimber.org/2004/03/05/upst..., which discusses the difficulty in deciding where Upstate New York starts. My solution of separating out all the editions from each other comes from the idea that for projects such as this, in order to avoid difficulties of deciding where "Upstate" starts, one should just sort by county.

Umm, speaking here in my role as Upstate New Yorker: that's actually a solved problem.

Depending on who's speaking, the colloquial definition doesn't always match the formal definition, but there is a formal definition. (Demographically, "Upstate" begins at the Bronx/Westchester border. And Long Island is - counterintuitively - formally defined as part of "Upstate".)

(Huh. Under the heading of "Gee, it's a small Internet": it turns out that I know one of the posters on that "Crooked Timber" thread.)

>12
In my 30+ years as an "adult", I must have been to 200 dinner parties and I've never had anyone, drunk or sober, come up to me and say —"The Chicago Manual of Style is my favorite book!".

I always suspected that I was not being invited to the REALLY good parties :(

O.

>19:

At least you now know the proper comeback, and you'll be ready.

(I've never heard it at a dinner party, either, but I'm pretty sure that I know a few people capable of saying it.)

Message edited by its author, Feb 19, 2007, 11:08pm.

17 > well yes people who admired the Chicago manual of style,I seem to run into people who despise it, would no doubt wish to editions. and that is precisely why combining them would be socially correct.

As to Bibles, yes I deliberately chose Bibles that were likely to be thought of as complimentary but I I was foolish to attempt that as an example the distinction is indeed at a different level.

It seems that this whole discussion is a close relative to the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis* in linguistics. The closer people are to a topic, and hence more knowledgeable, the finer distinctions they make, and the more those distinctions become important.

Years ago I used to marshal at car racing events, when I first went I could see that the cars were different colours and that was about all. As I talked to the other marshals I started to learn personal details about the drivers, their mutual histories, their driving styles, . . . not only did the racing become a lot less boring but the colours became pretty much irrelevant too.

The converse works true, when I lived in Africa the bird life was profuse and highly coloured - again I learned from friends but was baffled by the common breed 'lbj'. It turned out to be 'little brown jobbie' and was a generic term for whole groups of species of 'uninteresting' birds.

I guess one of the underlying questions is 'who sets the standard?' the expert or the disinterested. Tim's dinner party story is a strong steer towards empowering the disinterested. That is if I know enough about the topic to make fine distinctions then my opinion of combining in that topic is less valuable than that of the combiner who waves an arm towards the bookshelf and declares the works/books as all the same.

* They hypothesised that eskimo languages had more words for snow than other languages because it formed an important part of their environment. The hypothesis comes in weak and strong versions but I don't recall the difference!

As I undersatand it the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis is that people perceive what they have words for and do not perceive what they do not have words for. The weak hypothesis is that this is mostly baloney.

On a practical level, those with a strong interest in a subject are just those who are likely to hold the most strong opinion and will likely win any combine/uncombine war. So unless Tim comes up with a more concensus based system, why not just bow to necessity?

On a practical level, those with a strong interest in a subject are just those who are likely to hold the most strong opinion that their personal view is correct and so enter into a combine/uncombine war. So why not just bow to Tim's criteria?

#18, As a New Yorker (both upstater some of the time and downstater most of the time), AsYouKnow_Bob is (in my opinion) correct.

Plus, to a native New Yorker (NYC variety), "the city" is only Manhattan; people in the other four boroughs of New York City refer to going to Manhattan as "going to the city."

SimonW11 and nperrin (#15, #16) King James Bible seems to be straying a little from the original title of this thread but can't resist jumping in with a little bit of knowledge I didn't know before Christmas. Whilst it certainly passes the dinner party test it does not have a unique text. I bought a copy recently published in the Penguin Classics series and edited by David Norton. In his introduction he says that the original text of 1611 contained printer's errors which were corrected. This process carried on as some printers not only corrected what were obvious 'typos' but also what they considered errors of translation. The process ended with a version produced by Oxford in 1769 which became the 'standard' KJB. The new Penguin version is from the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible which aimed to be faithful to the original KJB text. Norton says that the language of the 1769 edition is neither authentic for 1611 nor the present and has no special authority. From what I've read so far I'm inclined to agree with him but I think some readers of this thread would not want this version to combine with KJB.

Message edited by its author, Feb 20, 2007, 10:11am.

Off topic but in this thread.

#18 Whose formal distinction? As a NYC resident till I was 37 (and I still work there), I agree "Upstate" began at the Bronx border. But Long Island wasn't upstate, it either "the Island" or "out on the Island"

I have actually had arguments with people when I've pointed on that Queens and Brooklyn are actually on Long Island (geographically). They insisted that "The Island" started with Nassau.

Now I live in the lower Hudson Valley and "upstate" has receded further north.

#26. Absolutely right. Grew up in Queens and the Bronx and everyone referred to Manhattan as "the city"

Message edited by its author, Feb 20, 2007, 10:12am.

>25 If Tim's criteria were so clear we wouldn't have this long thread.

>7

That's why you consider them all the same work, and therefore combine them together; else someone will have to devise some equation to determine when a new edition is the same and when it is different, and then you'll have 58 different interpretations of said equation.

Also, if publishers of The Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition didn't consider it to be the legitimate successor to all the previous ones going back to the 1st, they wouldn't call it The Chicago Manual of Style, but something completely different.

You wouldn't say that George Bush and George Washington were not both presidents because the US was completely different under both men.

Now you could consider all the editions separate works, and tie them together only as a "meta-work" which would be an equally valid way of looking at it, but the criteria were not set that way.

#26 rebeccanyc - thanks!

#28 alibrarian #18 Whose formal distinction?

It's actually how NYS government views it, it's how their demographic reports break up data for the state:

e.g.

Total: NYS (c) (where c is some datum = a+b)
subtotals: NYC (a) Upstate (b)

Mostly that's an artifact of the nice 45/55 split in population, and of the autonomy of NYC government, but there it is: NYS government officially defines "upstate" as everything outside of NYC.

I thought Sapir-Whorf was disproved and that it was discovered that Eskimos don't really have as many words for snow as described...

Anyway, hopefully when the much anticipated "changes" to the combining system come, it will help in crises :) like this one. But how many tiers will it need? One major WORK tier, and many subtiers for EDITIONS? Although it will be much more complicated, I guess...

Message edited by its author, Mar 7, 2007, 2:32pm.

IIRC it was indeed disproved - at least in the strong version - but the parallel with the hypothesis is valid.

The Chicago Manual of Style and the Joy of Cooking are the two best examples of why different editions are different books.

The 13th ed of the Chicago Manual includes an entire chapter on the typesetting process, including photographs of lead type and a "new" photolithography machine. This chapter is gone from the 14th ed.

In the '50s ed of the Joy of Cooking, there's a page that talks about dealing with radioactive fallout in your water; the '70s edition has instructions for tapping your maple tree that didn't appear in any other edition before or after.

Different editions are different books.

Message edited by its author, Feb 13, 2009, 4:46pm.

Reading this thread I was going to point to our discussion of the Joy of Cooking as a good case in point of how discussion helps refine the concept and achieve consensus - thread here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/52454
(34 beat me to the analogous nature of the problem - although I don't agree with the blanket statement that "different editions are different books" - we are talking about WORKS - different books, yes; different works, no)

Of course given the length of the thread on NCEs:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/56862
I'm not sure that consensus is always quick in coming.

We have had similar discussion about the Guinness Book of World Records - which resulted in a Series:
http://www.librarything.com/series/Guinn...

... and a discussion of the Textbook Genes which resulted in all editions being combined.

As a "lumper" I am inclined to include in one work "...all the editions of a book.. (quoted from the green sidebar) unless a "socially significant difference" can be generally agreed upon. (Caveat: I don't touch bibles, bible scholars are RABID!)

Splitting off separate editions should be the exception and not the rule! (and decided on a case by case basis - with appropriate disambiguation notices pointing people to any ongoing discussion)

If someone wants to split off a segment of editions there really needs to be a clear case and consensus for doing so. Regarding the 14th/15th Editions of the Chicago Manual of Style - I am unconvinced. Then again, I am an uninterested party. One chapter doesn't do it for me (nearly every textbook does this - change some insignificant percentage of text and the next crop of freshman has to buy a whole different book - BAH!)...you would need to propose a solution that doesn't involve EVERY Edition being a separate work (which defeats the concept of "Works" entirely). An example of a more compelling hypothetical argument:

"Editions n through x were edited by the Blankety-Blank Association. In 1976 the Muckety-Muck Committee took over the publication of this work and the focus changed from p to q and the format was completely overhauled in subsequent editions with over 50% new material and complete re-working of the entire text."

Message edited by its author, Feb 13, 2009, 11:00pm.

#18/31

Living on Long Island, not a single person I've met in the last twelve years of living here has ever thought they were living upstate. Upstate begins in Westchester County. I found the latter out quickly when I arrived here, when someone told me they were going upstate. I asked, where? Answer, Yonkers. Egads, I thought to myself, you can walk from the Bronx into Yonkers, and they are still have New York accents.

My wife is from Rome, NY, definitely upstate. From the point of view of her and her relatives, the big question is whether Albany is upstate or not.

Here is a vote for combining even very different editions of the same work.

I am fascinated by manuscripts before the printing press -- each edition is essentially an edition of one copy.* But if Jean, Duc de Berry has a manuscript copy of Marco Polo's Book of Travels, which he did have, then I feel a connection because I have an edition of that book, also. His was in French, mine in English, but our libraries share at least one book. So in theory we could talk about it at this mythical cocktail party (OK, so he's been dead 500 years - a bit of a challenge, I admit).

So even though our editions are very different, I like to think that they are essentially the same book.

* There is a whole academic genre based on figuring out what manuscript was copied from what source manuscript, etc. due to analysis of scribal errors. And there will be errors. It's like following a book's DNA mutations.

I would agree with Protia Long. Separating out each edition is neither a good solution, nor a possible one. If there are natural breaks in the Chicago Manual of Style as there were in Joy of Cooking, and a structure can be decided on so that there are a few works connected by a series, then fine. I haven't read anything here that makes me think that 14 and 15 belong in different works.

I don't need to spell out my take on this issue as regular visitors to the group can predict.

I want to remind participants here that the outcome of this discussion is going to have repercussions for all kinds of publications, especially dictionaries, primers, handbooks, guidebooks, floras and other instructional and reference publications.

This discussion and others like it, such as about the NCEs, just shows that there is an increasing need for contained in relationships .. allowing us to both separate NCEs, other critical editions, even perhaps abridged versions, while still maintaining the relationship of the work as a whole (as suggested by yue and nperrin.

Tim has suggested that that will be part of Stage 3 of the Edit Page (where you enter author's name along with all other contributers). But that was almost 2 years ago...

Yes, I agree we desperately need "relations" like "contained in", "adaptation of", etc.

Preferably not just under works though, but also between them.