The Question of Anthologies

Gah. Accidentally posted in Book Talk. Oy vey. Anyway.

Perhaps this has been covered. I've combed through many of the posts here, but haven't found exactly this question. Pardon me if it has been covered - just direct me to the right thread.

Anyway - I have several anthologies of single author works (and multiple author works as well) and wonder what the rules are regarding combining with the individual works included in the single volume. For example, I have a copy of each Jane Austen novel, but in a single volume rather than separates.

Any advice? Should an anthology be combined with the individual works it conains? I haven't done any combining or separating for fear of making things worse.

The consensus is that individual works should not be combined with anthologies or collections. A copy of Sense and Sensibility is not the same a volume that also contains Persuasion and Lady Susan.

Also, be careful when combining "Selected works", "collected works" and the like to be sure that they are the same. I generally avoid combining these unless I am certain that there is no difference in the contents, and that there is no significant additional material (such as essays, commentaries, and the like) that would make them, in my view, different works.

If you combined your collection with Northanger Abbey, and then with Emma, this combines Northanger Abbey with Emma, which clearly is wrong. Tim has mentioned a contains / contained in linking as a posibility but it seems slow coming, it's probably down the priority list somewhere.

I suspect when we do get it, we will find that different "complete novels" of Jane Austen will all contain the six main novels but will differ in whether they include Lady Susan and the two incomplete works (The Watsons, Sanditon)

While combining/decombining I have come across several cases where the individual works were entered with notation in the title that they were physically part of X omnibus/anthology.

They were not linked by LT, the individual doing data entry had decided to create records for each of the included works.

Funky, no?

In re selected works, etc., I've been a-r/oc enough to go into the records and track down the entries on Amazon/LC/whatever so that I have a reasonable clue about match/not-match status.

yrs

kd7mvs

kd7mvs wrote: "While combining/decombining I have come across several cases where the individual works were entered with notation in the title that they were physically part of X omnibus/anthology.

They were not linked by LT, the individual doing data entry had decided to create records for each of the included works.

Funky, no?"

While I agree that it looks odd when viewing the social data, I can understand how someone would wish to organize their catalog this way for research purposes (I know a few academics who catalog the contents of periodicals this way using index cards or MS Access tables).

Because LT currently doesn't have any way to deal with the contents of anthologies or collections, this is probably as good a workaround as any, enabling the user to search, sort, and keep track of their data to a degree the program doesn't otherwise provide.

I think I'm one of the people who did the funky indexing.

example: I have a volume called Six great modern short novels. I of course entered the book. And I created six entries for each of the individual short novels in the volume. Here's one case by Melville.

Billy Budd, foretopman : what befell him in the year of the Great Mutiny, etc. (In: Six great modern short novels)

I have not done this extensively yet, but my rationale is that I do have a copy of the work (inside another work) and that I wish to see the social aspects of owning that particular title.

And I wanted to index where some specific titles are buried inside of anthologies so I'd remember where they were.

Similar is a separate catalog I've created under user name alibrarian_index where I have entered articles
in serial publications.

Like marietherese says, it is a workaround the limits of LT right now to record information I would like to have. I really like tagging the individual articles ;-)

I was tempted to post this to the gripes section of this group but I have recently come across some rather unusually entered data.

I was doing some combining in the entry for Kim Newman and saw the following entry Pitbull Brittan (in Temps - GAIMAN) which is an entry for a single story in an anthology. On searching for "in Temps - GAIMAN" I can see that the same user has an entry in the database for each story of that anthology. I guess that this isn't an isolated case and that he has a number of anthologies entered like this.

I've seen a number of examples like this, andyl, and it's driving me nuts.

People are entering a short story collection under the name of the author of their favourite story in the collection, like that Newman/Gaiman example above. Neil Gaiman fans seem to be particularly prone to this.

Would it not be better to enter the collection under the name of the editor and then flag in the comments that it happens to contain a short story by a particular author?

If there could be some sort of recommendation as to how this would be handled, I know the social data would be a great deal more accurate.

I don't believe it is possible to easily search and sort one's library by comments and this ability to search for and sort by something within an anthology is probably what's prompting these entries in the first place. For some types of academics, collectors and cataloguers, knowing what's inside a book is as essential as knowing what's on the cover and spine, so I can see why people are doing this and expect that they will continue to do so until Library Thing allows deeper, more customized searching and sorting.

Alibrarian -

I don't know if it's you, but I've found something similar in Victor Hugo's novels. Someone has taken the anthology:

The works of Victor Hugo. One volume ed. Poems, novels, stories of crime, dramas and essays on humanity

And divided it into:

* Stories of Crime (The Works of Victor Hugo, with the hunch-back of notre dame; essays on humanity)

* The Hunch-back of Notre Dame (The Works of Victor Hugo, with stories of crime; essays on humanity; poems )

* Poems (The Works of Victor Hugo, with the hunch-back of notre dame; stories of crime; essays on humanity)

* essays on humanity (The Works of Victor Hugo, with hunch-back of notre dame, the; stories of crime; poems) by Victor Hugo (separate)

Of course, whenever I see them separated, I combine them with the One Volume Edition entries, since regardless of how the individual wants them to appear in their own library, they are the same work. Unless they've literally torn the book into 4 sections, which is a horrifying thought.

No, that one is not me.

So far (although I have experimented) I have been selective and not created index entries for everything I possibly could have done.

When I have done it, I catalog the whole work. I then create brief entries for the titles in the work I want to index to show where I can find them.

I have done anthologies like Six great modern short novels because it fits into my personal guidelines of the individual titles being substantial works in their own right and by different authors. I would never attempt to index something like The complete tales & poems of Edgar Allan Poe

I might index a single substantial work (like a novel) included in a larger collection.

And I might index The best of Herman Melville : Moby Dick, Omoo, Typee, Israel Potter because it is actually four of his novels. Just because my copy of Moby Dick is included in this collection doesn't mean I don't share ownership of it with users who own the title published alone.

And for one complicated example, I've considered indexing Berlin stories by Christopher Isherwood because it was first published in 1946 under this title and is actually a collection comprised of an earlier novel and a short story collection. The novel is The last of Mr. Norris, first published in 1935 as Mr. Norris changes trains. The short stories were first published as a collection in 1939 as Goodbye to Berlin. The point here is that I would not index each story, but I might index the novel and the short story collection because they were earlier independent publications and some users might own them.

In any case, I'm not doing much of this indexing right now hoping that LT will come up with a way in the near future to handle these situations.

I hope that a solution is found. Right now I have many novels that do not "count" simply because they are included with other works in a single volume. My way of thinking (FWIW and right or wrong) is that a novel/story/biography - the copywrighted thing itself is the work and the method in which it is published (bound book, ebook, collection or audio) is the book. With this in view, I've toyed with the idea of listing each work in an anthology as a separate book, but this is inaccurate and so I've held off even though it limits somewhat my recommendations and ability to review. But it's not the end of the world.

I could start a new thread, but it kind of fits.

What should we do about Walt Whitman?

The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) is combined with the "Deathbed" (1900) edition. Perhaps even with editions inbetween.

For those who don't know, Whitman basically kept republishing his one work, Leaves of Grass, throughout his life, continually expanding, and revising it. The first edition contained only 12 poems. The final edition significantly more.

Basically it's the same thing as "Collected Works"...they all should be separate, right?

Yes, Leaves of grass is a lot like "collected works". I knew that in effect, each new edition was an "enlarged ed." over the previous one. After checking a little, I see that there are either eight or nine editions growing from the 12 poem first ed. (1855) to the 383 poem "Deathbed" ed. At some point he even absorbed an entire separately published collection Drum-taps (1865) into Leave of grass. So no one edition is like the other.

So I would agree that they should be treated like "collected works" or "enlarged editions" and treat each ed. as separates.

gavroche - why would you consider The Hunch-Back of Notre Dame to no longer be a "work" simply because a publisher has included it in a larger volume of works? I'm sorry but "The HunchBack of Notre Dame is not the same work as "Essays on Humanity". They are, however, the same volume or the same book, but NOT the same work. And it's works that we are combining.
If one of the goals is for folks who own a work to connect with others that own that work, shouldn't "The Hunch-Back of Notre Dame" be listed just as in the example you used? Otherwise, the only connection is with a handful of folks who happened to have acquired this work in a larger volume of works.

O.

Well..in this case, these aren't four separate works that were combined by a publisher. They are dozens of smaller works that were combined under 4 separate sections.

"Essays on Humanity" is a title Walter J Black/Black's Readers Service gave a collection of essays that appeared individually elsewhere. That title only appears in that volume. Or perhaps future volumes put out by that publisher, but I have only heard of the 1927/1928 editions.

The same goes for "Stories of Crime".

In each case you're not likely to find the same group of works in any other volume. You can separate them and wait for others to claim they have them...but the only ones who do will be those who own the same collected works.

"Poems" is a generic; it shouldn't be combined with other "Poems" that might be a different selecton.

Only Notre Dame de Paris/Hunchback of Notre Dame appears anywhere else under that title.

There is an LT feature apparently under construction that will allow us to catalog the contents of a "collected works". That will solve the connection issue. And by including the contents of the other sections, you will be able to 'connect' with those who have "Claude Geuex" and "Last Day of a Condemned" which both appear as "Stories of Crime" but were originally published separately, and appear often alone or in other collections.

If we divide up collected works, it approaches an absurd extreme, where I would divide up my collection of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into 383 separate poems. It is quite true that there are, for example, single volumes containing only "Song of Myself". Song of Myself can't be combined with Leaves of Grass because it's just one poem. The only way for owners of the separate-volume "Song of Myself" to connect with those who happen to have "Song of Myself" as part of Leaves of Grass would be for owners of Leaves of Grass to separate all the poems out individually.