ISBN makes book suspect

[Alaina]

What do I do with cases like this? The ISBN and ISBN-13 for this book

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...

makes it look kind of suspect. There's nothing with those ISBNs in WorldCat or LOC, but a search on isbndb.com and lookupbyisbn.com yields an edition of the book that was supposedly published several years before the generally acknowledged first edition.

[Vicky]

If the ISBNs are valid, you do nothing.

ETA: Is there anything outside of the Wikipedia article that makes you question the original publication date? If you Google "The Bafut Beagles 1950" there are several hits including the ability to buy the 1950 edition on B&N and Amazon. It's possible that it was a limited first run or something of the sort and it was printed for a wider audience in 1954.

[Alaina]

Thanks for responding, Vicky. Anything that suggests there's a 1950 edition of Bafut Beagles is almost certainly in error. The author's official biography at his non-profit (durrell.org) says he published his first book in 1953. Both Wikipedia and a popular book collector's first edition bibliography site list 1954 as the first edition of Bafut Beagles. This matches the copyright date I have in the book in front of me. And 1954 is the earliest edition of Bafut Beagles in the catalogs of WorldCat, LOC, and the British Library. Same for first edition searches on ABE and Alibris. ABE and Alibris do each turn up one copy of a 1950 edition, but it's from a seller called "Sparks Distribution Center", a volume used book seller, so not a strong source for a questionable pub date.

Since the ISBN data in the GR record for this supposed 1950 edition is only validated in the non-LOC ISBN lookup sites, which I've read in other threads are sometimes fishy, should I just leave the record as it is with the ISBN intact, but make a note about the questionable ISBN attribution in a librarian note? Or is there something else I should do?

[vicki_girl]

I would ignore it. It is currently listed without a date, so it won't mess up the original publication date.

There's really not much else to do, since it is virtually impossible to prove that something didn't exist. If you really want to you could try contacting the publisher. They might be able to confirm whether that ISBN was ever actually used. (Though given the age they might not have the appropriate records anymore.)

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static...

(Viking is now a part of the Penguin Group.)

[Alaina]

Okay. Leaving it alone is good feedback. I'll put a librarian note in, too, though, so that if someone else comes upon the record they don't have to reproduce the research. Thanks!