Is this really a series?

http://www.librarything.com/series/Christmas+Books

This strikes me as borderline, at best.

The books are referred to as a series. See this page. The short stories are iffy - but frequently the books are published in collections with various short stories.

I think the 5 are a series.

And until LT has a "related to" or "contains/contained in" feature I think that it is not a bad idea to use the "series" function this way (like we see with periodicals) to link the Short Stories in there as well..

I don't think that stretching the series concept to include these examples is as fraught with problems as, say, entering a publishers series - where an LTer could rightfully say "my book is NOT part of the XXX Publisher's Collection."

(I'm going to fiddle with this for a bit and see if I can get any useful combining/display function out of it.)

>tjsjohanna

I messed with the numbering system a bit to give more space to slide things in in some semblance of order. (Hope, I didn't screw up what you were aiming for.)

This may be a lost cause however - for instance:
http://www.librarything.com/work/8274352
should really be combined with the others that contain 1-3 but I think it likely that it will get separated out again by one of it's owners (and I am not going to start an edit war). So should I add series info or no? sigh

Blech. These big authors are such a pain - everything has been republished in every variety.

This reminds me of the whole debate we got into with Tim in the Combiners! group.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/70333

Now that I am playing with it I think using the series page to do this is going to get out of hand - Tim really needs to come up with a "link together" feature. I don't like lumping together things with different content but 8 zillion variations of "Christmas Books and/or Stories" on the Dickens page with nothing tying them together is just messy and makes the whole author page less useable.

Ideally then you could have a MegaWork "Christmas Stories Anthology" on the author page and have all the different variations of 1+6 stories and 1-2 +5 stories under that with "Associated Works" being the 5 Christmas Books individually.

(The example I gave in the other thread was Anna Sewell's page: http://www.librarything.com/author/sewellanna )

That was the problem I had with this series way back when I started working on it. There are sooo many republished versions. I think whatever you want to do (or not do) is fine. Maybe the only real way to use the series function for this series right now is to only include the books when published separately - and not include any publications that also have short stories as part of the edition. I don't know. But the five novels ARE a series - at least everything I could find indicates that Dickens wrote them as a series. It's a mess, though.

Should this be a series? http://www.librarything.com/series/time-travelling+Oxford+historians

I only read To Say Nothing of the Dog myself, but my understanding is that it, Blackout, and Doomsday Book (I don't know about the others) are just sort of on the same "world" but are not necessarily connected more closely by repeating characters or series per se.

I think being about the same fantasy world is enough to count as a series.

I'm not sure that's always the case. The other Middle Earth history books edited by Christopher Tolkien aren't part of the series "The Lord of the Rings," though it's still Middle Earth - the characters are different, and isn't really a part of the same story arc.

But I ask because I'm not aware of how linked these books are in addition to the setting (future, science fiction w/time travel). From looking at the author's website, Blackout and All Clear are one story about the Blitz and should be a series on their own, and they currently are not.

>7 bell7: I seem to recall that To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book do share a character or two. And I think the same department runs the time travel process, it's been a long time, my memory is a bit fuzzy. So those two could reasonably be linked as a series. Not sure about the others.
From a personal standpoint I'd say it's legitimate. If nothing else, being linked by a common world/reality is a fairly strong connection within a single author's works.

You don't have to share any characters to be a series, if the books are set in the same world and using the same settings for the stories.

Yes the Connie Willis books are a series, they are by the same author, focus on the same subjects using the same world-building. Blackout is not a stand alone or just with All Clear, it is part of the time travel series.

In fact it takes the premise from the earlier books that historians who travel in time, can't change the events of time, and screws with it.

There are other fantasy universes where all the books set in that universe are under one umbrella series and other series have been set up for the subsets that contain story arcs with the same characters. I believe Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe series and McCaffrey's Pern series are set up this way. I'm surprised no one has done it with Middle Earth.

ETA: In fact, I'm pretty sure that there was a Middle Earth series at one point. Did someone delete it?

> 11

You don't have to share any characters to be a series, if the books are set in the same world and using the same settings for the stories.

Really? By that logic, any books by the same author in the same setting on similar subjects would be part of a series. War and Peace and Anna Karenina? The Greek Passion and Freedom or Death?

I'm not buying it.

Someone created a series from all of Mike Resnick's Birthright Universe stories. Mike Resnick has a timeline associated with that universe, but it didn't really seem like a series to me. Any time a new book is written, all the numbering for the other books would have to be changed. I converted the series to a place. I.e., I added a "Birthright Universe" entry for each book under Important Places and removed it from Series. That way people can find all the books in the "series" easily. It seemed much more appropriate than series, at least in this case. I think it could easily apply to Willis' time travel books too.

13> That's why I said fantasy world in my post.

14> I believe there's a series for all the Star Wars books. They avoid the problem with having to renumber if an earlier book is written by making the numbers by the years the stories take place. Perhaps something like that could work for the Birthright Universe stories.

> 13 I don't really care whether you buy it or not. Its so much more fun to tear things down, so I am not surprised. The books you mention are regular fiction. In genre its not unusual. Ever heard of Discworld ? Many books do share characters, but some don't they only share the setting, but they are still part of the series.

>13 lilithcat:

ISFDB calls them (or at least the better part of them) a series as well: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Connie_Willis and http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?25690

Not that they are the most important thing but in SF/Fantasy, that's an important place to check for series.

What do you need in order to buy it as a series? A publisher to call them a series on a cover? Honestly I prefer to trust ISFDB more than any publisher... :) Or Willis calling them a series? If that's the definition, some series would never have been series...

Technically they are a series - one of those spanning ones but still a series. And they do not break the LT definition of a series.

So I would leave it (although I would put capital letters on the name if the series probably...)

Thanks for the comments. Like I said, I only read one book so I wasn't entirely sure how the others were linked, but it sounds like a series I would leave alone.

"What do you need in order to buy it as a series? A publisher to call them a series on a cover? Honestly I prefer to trust ISFDB more than any publisher... :) Or Willis calling them a series? If that's the definition, some series would never have been series... "

Actually yes. The LT definition in the box calls series an intentional creation. In other words, someone has to have intended them to be a series at creation, either the publisher or the author(s). In LT world, series isn't a fan-created invention.

I would say that intentionally setting a series of stories in the same world with an internally consistent chronology makes it an intentional creation. It's not like the fans came along later and said "hey, these stories could be set in the same world".

>20 KingRat:

You realize that if a book is branded as part of a series, it may not get bought by someone that never read the previous ones, right? That's one of the reasons these are considered non-serial basically I suspect. But they are a series - they do not share setting, history, characters in some points and the way the world works as an afterthought...

I have a number of books about Indian tribes by Sonia Bleeker http://www.librarything.com/author/bleekersonia. She wrote 17 or so. (She also wrote a shorter series about African tribes.) On the back cover of one, it says "This series constitutes an outstanding contribution to a better understanding of the first Americans." -- Science Education. Does that make it a series, then? Bleeker did not write them in alphabetical order, but that is how they are listed on the back cover of this particular title. It would be sensible, and easiest, to list them alphabetically. I'd like their info to be on the series page, if they are considered a series. OK, I've basically talked myself into it - they're a series. But I'd still like to hear from fellow LTers about it.

>24 SaintSunniva:, Non-fiction series are difficult. There's not really a significant difference between a series of non-fiction works on separate (albeit very closely-related) topics and the publisher series that so often get shot down here. I could see it either way for the Sonia Bleeker example, but then I could see it either way even if those books had been commissioned from different authors by a publishing company.

The way I see it, identifying a series is about how much uniqueness a group of books shares. Works of fiction set in the real world are perhaps the hardest to set in a series, because the bar has to be set high. Fiction isn't "about" a subject the way non-fiction often is, and if it isn't science fiction or fantasy, then the setting (the real world) is to broad, unless a single author chose a very specific place. This really only leaves characters--preferably the protagonist.

Getting back to the original discussion, science fiction and fantasy so often have invented (or tweaked in very specific ways) settings, so this tends to set them apart and naturally groups them. Whether this type of grouping is a series as LT currently defines it or not, I think that there should be some way to link them. I tend to think of this shared-universe level of grouping as a "franchise" rather than a series, as some of the largest and most obvious examples (Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, etc.) are commissioned and written by multiple authors. Perhaps a Franchise field would help with both the issue of books sharing a setting and Publisher-created series. Star Wars and Complete Idiot's Guide serve similar functions in grouping books together.

'Nother question:
http://www.librarything.com/series/Knitting+socks

This appears to be just a group of books about knitting socks. They are not all by the same author, nor even from the same publisher.

That really does look like a list, not a series. If I were on the language site that it is entered in (not.com) and had any of the books, I would remove them.

Would someone like to politely tell this user that a publisher is not a series, even if they do number their books:

http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/changelog.php?user=940689

>28 r.orrison: - private message left for this user.

>28 r.orrison:/29 - UPDATE - I received a comment in response to my private comment from this user, they are going to try out one of my suggestions as to how to include this info. (Isn't it nice when people are perfectly reasonable? - restores my faith in humanity by just a little bit.)

And so, you don't/didn't have the time to contact me directly? Perhaps you couldn't have done so politely :)
I apologize for misusing the field according to your (LT) rules. And yes, I know what constitutes a series, no need for you to be condescending. On the other hand, I am less well versed in proper LT usage than I will be. Anyway, had I a chance to correct my misapplication on my own I would have done so. Arbitrarily removing member data without informing them first doesn't help them understand why or to help them avoid the same errors in the future.
Cheers.

To all, my previous post, Message 31, was in response to message 28.

(replied privately)

bientrey, I'm sorry that you're upset by this (though it sounds like you did get a profile comment as well as the mention here), but I wanted to clear up one detail -- Common Knowledge, such as the series data, is not "member data". Nobody but you can ever touch your own member data, but since Common Knowledge is sitewide data, it's editable by anyone. I understand that you probably spent a lot of time on entering it, and I'm sorry that effort was wasted, but look at it from someone else's perspective -- as they see it, there's wrongly entered data cluttering up the site and their own series coverage pages.

http://www.librarything.com/series/The+Bachman+Books

I'm inclined to not consider the books written by Stephen King as Richard Bachman a series in their own right. The only connection is that he used the same pen name for them all. If that's all it takes, we got lots of series coming our way.

35> What's weird is that King has a collection called The Bachman Books from which this series appears to take its name. But someone went on to add all the other Bachman-named books that have nothing to do with that title. I have to agree with KingRat.

ETA: I wish LT had better pseudonym support. It would be nice to have it show "Blaze by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman), where "Stephen King" and "Richard Bachman" were both links and took you to different views, with the second limited to books only under that pen name but with a link back to the main Stephen King author.

At least some of these are reprints. http://www.librarything.com/series/The+Biblical+Resource+Series

Correction. It is specifically a reprint series. http://www.eerdmans.com/series/brs.htm

http://www.librarything.com/series/Perpetua+Reeks

Faust had been entered on .com. I removed it. The rest seem to be on another site.

This seems to be a group of books by Larry McMurtry set in Thalia, Texas. I don't know the works enough to know whether they constitute a series. Anyone?

http://www.librarything.com/series/Thalia%2C+Texas

Edited to fix URL. If it's not a series, then it seems like the best way to link these would be through the location field. At least one of the books already has this listed in the location field.

39> Scanning the reviews for each, they all appear to follow the story of Duane Moore. So yeah, I'd say they appear to be a cohesive series.

Are these books commonly referred to as a series? Or as the "Thalia, Texas" series?

Looking at a reviews, they're commonly referred to as sequels.

ETA: And no, I don't see any specific name used for them. They do all appear to be centered around Thalia, though. The town itself appears to sort of be a character, if that makes sense.

They're counted as 'The Last Picture Show' series on Fantastic Fiction. I'd check there first for fiction series'.

The Larry McMurtry Thalia books (The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Duane's Depressed, etc.) are a series.

Thanks everyone. So, looks like a series, but that it's called various things. I'll leave it as is for the moment.

How about this one?
Du Maurier's Cornish novels

I've read Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, and didn't think of them as part of a series, but I'm throwing it out there to anyone who might know more...

#46 I don't think this should be a series and took my books out of it but someone put them back so I left them and put a note in the series description.

Potentially "not really a series," or ambiguously/badly named series, as well as incorrectly formatted:
http://www.librarything.com/series/Stuart%20Little
http://www.librarything.com/series/Stuart%20Little%202

The particular books someone put in this series seem to be picture/photograph books of stills from the Stuart Little movies, so the series title should probably reflect that. "Stuart Little" as a series title is a bit too vague, since these particular books are based on a film that was itself based on the original Stuart Little book by E.B. White.

Just a question.

Tonight I entered Thirty seconds over Tokyo and found it was in a series:

http://www.librarything.com/series/Landmark+Books

My copy is the juvenile work and is in that series. If someone had the original issue of the book, it would not be in the series.

Has the policy on publishers series changed.

Thanks

Edited to try to get the touchstone to work.

When you say juvenile work, do you mean it's abridged?

49-50: According to the intro to a recent edition of the book, p. xxv:
"Random House published the Landmark edition of Thirty Seconds over Toyko 10 years after hte original edition. This version was edited slightly for the younger generation and became a "Book of the Month" selection."
http://books.google.com/books?id=nQpgp238Gj8C&pg=PR25&dq=landmark+books+...

I guess it boils down to what "edited slightly" means, but it sounds to me like the original and the juvenile edition would be considered separate works by LT - and thus the juvenile edition might indeed be unique to that series.

#50 & #51

It doesn't say in the book that it was abridged or adapted for young readers, just that maps and photos are the same as the "original edition." Print is larger than many adult books. Pagination is 186 p. The 1943 original Random House is 221 p. and another ed. from Hale is 184 p.

One other difference I picked up is the editor is named Robert Considine in the 1943 and Bob Considine in the 1953 but they are the same person.

I don't know this series, but basically, either
- it's abridged, in which case it's a different work, in which case the series designation is probably fine unless the same abridged version exists outside the series; or
- it's not abridged, in which case it shouldn't be listed in the series.

This website about the series lists the book as abridged:
http://www.alternities.com/opinion/landmark.htm

The juvenile version might not necessarily say if it were abridged; to know for sure would probably require comparing the two side by side.
(edited for typo)

#53

I will try to get the original version at my college library and compare. (It may take a while as I am on medical leave.)

How about http://www.librarything.com/series/Bantam%27s+Agatha+Christie+Mystery+Collection (Bantam's Agatha Christie Mystery Collection) as the latest publisher's series?

I see this is now gone. Did soemone explain to the member who entered them?

http://www.librarything.com/series/The+American+Humorists is another one, if there even is a published to begin with. And, no, I didn't notify anyone.

Oh oh looking at the related series for the above, I notice that people have started adding previously published books back into the New Canadian Library series once again. A few works (very few, mostly collections) have been published for the series, but most are not, including A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence. Many of these works predate the series by decades.

The member should be notified out of courtesy. What if they are a newbie?

It has taken 2 months but I have obtained the original version of Thirty seconds over Tokyo. See thread above:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/73046#2119679

and messages following it.

The pagination of the 1943 is different and some of the illustrations are different even though Landmark says they are the same. A map in the Landmark Books is not in the original but the endpapers in that edition have a different map. Comparing samples of the text side by side, it is identical. The original has a postscript with details of the raid that is not in the children's version (about 20 pages) but it is missing the index that Landmark has. No chapters in the adult, just one continuous narrative; Landmark divides to 11 chapters. And chapter 11 is a samll part of the original's postscript - the only evidence of abridging.

I'm not sure what to say in this case. The editions are together and my gut feeling today is to leave them. (Maybe Collectorator or someone else who has a better knowledge of children's works in the 1950's could weigh in here.) So that leaves the series which is listed as Landmark Books but only covers the children's version. Removing it means a gap in the series (and I think this may be the only example of a book in that series that was published for 2 markets and is substantially the same, not an abridgement). A dilemma!

Re #60

If Landmark Books, which is a publisher series, were moved to the new Publisher series field, this problem would be solved. In thinking about this, I feel the editions should remain together.

See this thread
http://www.librarything.com/topic/102076

Edited for typo and clarity