Unabridged - Difinitives - Uncuts - Investigating?

After seeing PhoenixTerran's message on Diary of a Young Girl, http://www.librarything.com/topic/56387 where the Difinitive and original editions were combined (they're asking for opinions on whether is is right or not), I wondered if another Journal I knew that had been Unabridged had also been combined with it's counterpart...

And this is where I discovered that The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath have been combined with the original - 400 new pages on top of a 350 page pile of crap her husband tried to cobble together so he woudln't look so bad are now the "same work."

And then I thought of The Stand and I discovered that a user had combined the Uncut with its 300 new pages, subplots and characters with the hard cuts he had to make in 1978 to make a sellable copy for the editors.

And I've discovered now that Stranger in a Strange Land has had its original 400 page and the 525 page uncut editions combined...

To me these aren't even discussions - these are different works. This isn't a fancy intro, it's not a new cover, it's not minor. These are substantial changes to the original work.

This was all I could think of - and I think this deserves further investigation. This was all I could really think of at the moment...I'm sure these aren't the only uncuts to have been published...

Regarding the Stand, I'm sure that used to be separated. I think the problem with some of these is that while someone may carefully combine them out, it's very easy to not notice when they get lumped back together again.

Certainly, in all the cases you cite, I'd support separation.

I generally support separation in these types of instances as well.

It helps that disambiguation notices appear on the combine/separate confirmation pages now.

Perhaps the Canonical Title of one or both of the works could be changed with {Full} or {Complete} or something.

>4 jjwilson61: Sylvia's book is titled as Unabridged, the Stand is actually titled The Stand: Complete and Uncut as well - and Stranger in a Strange Land is the dicey one.

I'm not comfortable changing the Canonical Title to something it isn't...the Disambiguation notice will have to do.

What I am concerned about are other unabridged, extendeds, uncuts and the likes. I didn't think these were questions - just frustrations that will take a while to fix. I'm wondering how many more there are...

I've taken care of Sylvia and I think I've detangled The Stand - I had to do it by ISBN, so I'm going a little bleary-eyed.

I've left in disambiguation notices for both...if anyone else feels like tackling Stranger in a Strange Land...

:)

I have no opinion on the others but re: Stranger in a Strange Land I have read/compared them and am squarely ambivalent leaning towards "combined". RAH is my most favorite author but I simply don't care whether these are combined or separated. The story doesn't change, the plotline doesn't change, you don't miss it if it isn't there/ you don't notice it if it is, etc. BUT, this is my personal, private, non-relevant, opinion.

>7 PortiaLong: While I do appreciate what you're saying, it's an entire change in voice - and throughout the book. Some of it is almost careful editing-type stuffs, but in other ways, it's that Heinlein-way of describing things in just such a way that was trimmed down to meet the original ACE paperback requirement.

My biggest litmus test? You couldn't safely do quotes between the two works and have them assured to be the same - especially in Stranger. The additional 125 pages of text and the 60,000 words aren't done in a single chapter - they're all over the place. Some are tremendous chunks, some are more surgical in nature.

8> I'm not a fan of that standard; you certainly can't do identical quotes between translations, nor between many editions of non-fiction works generally agreed to be the same. A new edition of a cookbook that cut down on sugar and trans fats may be fundamentally the same but have changes all through it, as would one adapted to Britain by metricizing and misuse of the word "biscuit". In fact, most major fictional works have gone through many minor editions, sometimes minor bowlerdizing, the author or editor deciding to make minor changes for improvement or changes in the political winds, or editorial disagreement about the one true text. Just because changes are hard to find don't mean they're meaningful.

Being a lumper, I'm ambivalent about Stranger, but 125 pages and 60,000 words is an awful lot for the same work. The real litmus test may be "is it feasible to separate them"?

I think I'd lump the Strangers together. The cocktail party test to me says that if one person says to another Hey, have you read Stranger in a Strange Land" and they start to talk about it would they realize that they were talking about different versions? From what I understand there aren't any new plot elements or characters added and since most of the changes are scattered throughout it's unlikely that anything in particular would stick out as different.

What about something like Dr. Spock's Baby and Child care? The version I have is (I think) the eighth edition and obviously differs dramatically from the original edition written some sixty years previously, to the extent of containing large sections that flatly contradict what appeared in earlier versions. In fact, it's purported author had been dead for some seven years when it was published.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that all the many versions are in some important sense the same work, and are currently listed as such. I'd imagine this would really annoy me if I was a scholar of the history of pediatrics, but for most people who would simply want the most up-to-date edition available, they are the same work.

People who are reading Dr. Spock don't have time for cocktail parties.

I think there's a distinction to be made with Fiction and Non-Fiction when it comes to lumping or splitting editions and it would be clearer if the discussion were kept separate. You might want to check out the thread on the Joy of Cooking in this group.

It appears someone already beat me to it - and the two are separated.

I really don't see us being able to "judge" 60,000 words as "not different enough" for separation. It will make us look like people that just don't know books...

ETA -

What I'm saying is that we also have to remember that folks are going to author pages to see what was published. In the Stranger in a Strange Land case, this was done for the 30th anniversary and his estate took great pains to restore the text as intended. There's a lot of subtext and Heinlein-y prose added. It feels more like his voice to me when you read the extended version - and there's just more depth to it. And I seemed to get more of the hoopla about the book from the extended version. (Of course, I was older and not being forced to read it the second time.)

Words matter. There's some stuff that was cut for the sake of the general tone of the era - so that's restored as well. It's subtle, but it's there. Some of it is just bloat, but other parts of it just add. To me, it's almost like a Reader's Digest condensed vs. the actual book - only Heinlein wrote both...

I wonder if anyone has any opinion on The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson? There's the original book, as written by Poul Anderson as a young man, and there's a later text, as edited and written by Poul Anderson as an old(er) man. There's not, as I recall, a great deal of adding of material, but there's a lot of rewriting, making the prose less stylised and more functional. Whether these should be separated or lumped, I myself, am stumped.

You know, I was just thinking about this kind of thing yesterday for the children's book series I collect.

The series has nine central characters, each of which has six individual books. Those books can be bought separately or in a boxed set. But you can also by a Story Collection single volume that contains all six stories - only, five of the six stories are missing their appendix chapters. Example: Kit's Story Collection

These appendix chapters contain historical context for the preceding story, but they aren't essential to the story. So I'm torn on whether their absence in the single volume story collections is significant enough to consider them a different work from the boxed sets or not.

I'm leaning towards yes, they should be separated, but I'm not sure if my judgement is clouded by the fact that I collect both the collections and boxed sets.

I know that from a purist standpoint this won't make any sense, but : I also think it depends on the number of copies involved. It's after all also very much about connections between members.

If there are just a few users with a certain book, just having that title - in any form - may provide important connections. And if there are humongous numbers, then the people having the edition that gets separated will probably not loose a lot of connections.

>15 HoldenCarver:, 16 - I'm not familiar with either, but I feel like we should err on the side of "they're different." I'm getting increasingly conservative with words.

> 17 I understand what you're saying. And part of me really gets that P.O.V. But then I think to myself - where does that end? It's a slippery slope - and in some cases, only a few volumes actually is intended.

I guess the bigger question is how many of us are really making connections on a single volume in our library? For me, the interesting libraries and folks I follow come instead from folks with a lot of books in common with me - and these kinds of separations aren't going to make or break the bank. I'll admit for the record, though, I get far more interesting libraries from general talk - from folks that I really don't have that many books in common with...

I wish there were some more black & white rules myself. But you know the second we say, "11 or less" works - someone will come up with a 10-run limited edition. If we say there must be 22% new material, there will be a volume with 10% - only this will be a newly revised War & Peace, where that's 125 pages and it introduces a character named Biff the Robot of the Ukraine...

14> Yeah, any sort of subtle analysis will stamp us as people who just don't know books, because those sort of people are all about raw numbers and calculations.

"folks are going to author pages to see what was published." I hardly see that as relevant here; they go to author pages to get a list of the works of an author, as defined by LT. Either way, that's what they get, not every significant new edition. If I were writing a bibliography of Heinlein, I'd put both the unabridged and the abridged under 1961, subheading Stranger in a Strange Land.

"how many of us are really making connections on a single volume in our library?"

I think there's other connections that are also important; combined volumes have more data to make good recommendations from and have more reviews and are more likely to have any appropriate tag attached. Splitting off every slightly different text can produce a number of works that are poorly tagged, unreviewed, and that lack recommendations.

>20 prosfilaes: Frankly, seeing Sylvia Plath's journals combined, I assume the person that did that was a complete moron that knew nothing about Sylvia Plath, her work or the history of her journal publication.

That's 100% what I mean by not knowing books.

Frankly, if we're getting down to "as defined by LT," then we have bigger issues. I thought this was about what constituted being a different work, not what we thought would be most convenient for LT-perceived "needs."

Telling an author that their 2nd work doesn't exist when they release a definitive work because it's not "as defined by LT" is bunk. I've got no issues logically explaining why an Easton Press edition and a Penguin Classics edition are the same to someone. That's an easy argument (all the words are the same inside the cover).

I'd have a hard time looking Stephen King in the face and telling him that his Uncut Stand and original Stand was the same work because we needed to make sure that tags and recommendations were all awesome for users and stuff...

Looking at the list of works by the author is an interesting idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help much, since it leads me to the opposite conclusion from prosfilaes in #20.

If I was writing a bibliography of Heinlein I would definitely list the cut and uncut versions of Stranger separately, in the years they were published, since I think the existance of both and the differences between them say a lot about how his published writing and the world changed over time.

22> For one thing Title can vary widely depending on where the data came from. Just look at the editions page for any popular work and see how many different titles there are.

I've had a similar ongoing problem with the Bobbsey Twins books - some of them went through a complete revision on the 1950s/1960s. Some of the revised versions were just minor edits, some were complete rewrites with an entirely different plot, and some weren't revised at all. It would be *nice* to keep the revisions separated, but a) if I do, they never stay separate, and b) some of the revisions have the exact same title as the original, and none of them have ISBNs.

(Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys have a similar issue, but the revisions were far less dramatic for them, so I'm less concerned. And don't even get me started on trying to keep the Victor Appletons properly separate.)

21> Works are an arbitrary concept; there is no non-arbitrary line where one book is a translation of Beowulf and the other is an adaptation. There is no such thing as "what constitutes being a different work" outside the needs of LT or some other group. Authors, and anyone else outside LT, can deal.

Claiming that "all the words are the same inside the cover" is 100% what I would mean by not knowing books. There's three original editions of Hamlet, the standard Q2 and F1 that are combined to produce most modern Hamlets, despite the fact they don't have two hundred lines the same, and the first one, Q1, that's half the size of Q2. There are two original editions of Frankenstein that aren't always held separate in editing. Very few major works can we honestly claim that "all the words are the same"

I'm appalled that you can't look Stephen King in the face and tell him that his Uncut Stand and the original are the same work, but apparently would have no problem looking Martin Hammond, Stanley Lombardo, and Ian Johnston in their faces and telling them that not only are their translations of the Iliad are the same work, they're the same work as the translations of George Chapman, Alexander Pope, and every poetaster to try their hand at it over the years.

>26 prosfilaes: Except you're now ignoring two things.

1. There's already an established rule that translations do not make separate works. From the combination side-tab:

Foreign editions. The Italian and English-language editions of a book are the same work.

2. This is introduces the translator-as-author argument. While many translators have worked on the Iliad, Homer is the original author (intellectual arguments about oral tradition and likelihood of single authorship aside). It's Homer's work we're concerned with, not the work of the translator.

I started this thread specifically to discuss the deliberate release of definitive, uncut and extended versions of works - either by living authors, those close to their estate or those with an interest in restoring the full work of the deceased. Basically, where it's clear that there was a great deal of editing for one reason or another and then a chance and a market to go back and update with restored material. That's the discussion that I wanted to start.

Discussions regarding the various merits of translations, who does a better job, what a kind and literate translator brings to the table v. a hamfisted hack who is clearly in place just to get a novel to print v. an in-house translator that was clearly a C-student, but makes sure that the editions can be sold for $5 - well, that's a topic you should start anew...to be honest, it's a worthwhile discussion to have and another value-add at some point that LT could offer. (Imagine - language-specific for each site on showing which translation was a) most-owned & b) highest rated.) But it is a wholly different discussion.

edited for a & b logic

27> I'm not ignoring anything. The point was, that if we're all about egoboo for authors, there's much bigger issues to deal with. Works should be a consistent concept by LT for LT. "Extended, uncut" editions are a great marketing tool, but hardly a consistent test of significant differences.

#26: Works are an arbitrary concept; there is no non-arbitrary line where one book is a translation of Beowulf and the other is an adaptation. There is no such thing as "what constitutes being a different work" outside the needs of LT or some other group. Authors, and anyone else outside LT, can deal.

Amen.

#27: There's already an established rule that translations do not make separate works.

And there's a logic behind that rule that #26 was exploring, an overall governing philosophy as to what constitutes a work. The fact we have an established rule should be a rock in the harbor, not something unworthy of discussion. The question is, when is a revised version more like a translation (and thus part of the same work, by established rule) and when is it more like a radical adaptation (and thus separate, by convention)? #26 wasn't so much as introducing the translator-as-author question so much as demonstrating that the way it has already been settled has consequences for how we combine works which are not translations (in the traditional sense, at least).

Today I spent a bit of time separating out copies of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (that are actually unabridged) from the earlier Hughes-edited Journals. I combined all of the books with that ISBN into one grouping before combining them with the Unabridged Journals for ease of separating, in case somebody disagrees with my work. There were a few with that ISBN already correctly combined, btw. I added the following to the disambig notice on both versions:

"This disambiguation is made more difficult, because the British edition of the Unabridged Journals (ISBN 0571197043) is titled Journals of Sylvia Plath, so a number of unabridged copies continue to be combined incorrectly."

>30 carport:, No that's perfect!

It was the wholesale lumping of all the journals that I'd originally run across - you know, the Ted-versions lumped in with the real ones.

Thanks for sorting all of that out and for the new disambiguation notice.

I've got kind of a similar question related to the unabridged/abridged thing. What should I do when it's also a series of adaptations or abridged classics for children? For example, I separated Treasure Island (Dalmatian Press Adapted Classics), a title that appears to be a series of adapted classics for kids. I don't really know enough about these books to say how abridged or different from the original it is, but is it OK to separate because I don't want the series information in my library when I don't own that particular abridged work?

> 32

I believe it was correct to separate this "adapted series." The tags indicate that it's abridged.

I noticed that you added it to the "Dalmation Press Adapted Classics" series on LT; I believe it belongs in that series, not combined with the unabridged and unadapted work.

Is it generally acceptable, then, to separate abridged books or adaptations? I'm asking 'cause I'm coming from it in the opposite direction - I had the unabridged work and the series information showed up in my library when the abridged work was combined with it. It shows that I added the series because I re-entered the info for the proper work when I uncombined, but I don't know how significantly different the abridged is from the original.

>>Is it generally acceptable, then, to separate abridged books or adaptations?

That's the rule - adaptations and abridgments should not be in the main works.

thanks. :-) I didn't want to be uncombining overly much if it was just a series issue...

Just for series, no. Generally a Penguin and an Everyman edition - for example - are to be combined. But adaptations / abridgments simply do not equal the full editions in contents.

Penguin and everyman cannot be series in LT anyway...