Should I add an edition or not?

[Henry]

I'd like to add Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward to my books read. I own a Modern Library hardcover, copyright 1951, with an introduction by Heywood Broun. But there are already two separate listings, one with 217 editions (at least a dozen of which are the Signet pb.), the other with just one edition. I went through all 217 to find my edition. The closest I found was a Modern Library edition said to have been published 1949 (there is no indication of this in my edition), with a different number of pages (mine has 276): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4.... I've marked this for now as read, but I still have a question: Are there errors in this listing that should be corrected, or did Modern Library indeed publish two editions, one in 1949 and one in 1951, yet give no evidence of this in the 1951 edition? I'm asking because I have cover art to contribute, and don't want to add to the confusion by asking you to attach it to a wrong edition.
Note: the 1949 edition is assigned an ISBN13 9780394329802. Of course there was no such thing as ISBN at the time. When I searched this in Worldcat, I came up with a Modern Library edition from 1981.

[lethe]

I corrected the YoP to 1981.

According to Worldcat the first Modern Library edition was published in 1942: http://www.worldcat.org/title/looking...

ETA There were also earlier Modern Library editions, the 1917 one is already in GR. If you have searched through the editions and didn't come across a Modern Library one with your cover, I would just add a new edition.

(All those Signet editions are said to be published in 1960, yet they all have different ISBNs..)

[Henry]

Thanks, Lethe. I'll do that. If then at some later time someone with the 1942 edition says, "That's my cover!", then we can combine.

Yes, all those Signets. And in 1960 there was no ISBN. Sigh.

[Krazykiwi]

I'm not sure if I'm insane or just bored, but I'm going to have a go at cleaning some of these up. Expect questions :)

[Henry]

Krazykiwi wrote: "I'm not sure if I'm insane or just bored, but I'm going to have a go at cleaning some of these up. Expect questions :)"

Oh, I know the feeling. I feel like I'm being a bit too obsessive sometimes, but I like to have it right.

[Krazykiwi]

I did some Austen earlier in the week (not Jane, but her nephews biographies of her... that was bad enough. Holy editions batman.)

[lethe]

*cheering you on*

[Krazykiwi]

That was not a good idea at all. I did do a substantial amount of cleaning up on the rest of his books, and added a ton of who wrote the introduction to which editions, where that was clear, but it's a really big mess. Between the eleventy billion crappy e-book OCR's since the book went public domain, and the big mess that the signet classics editions create all by themselves, I am going crosseyed.

If anyone else wants to fiddle about in here, since it's sci-fi, I put some tips in the spoiler tag. Cos it's long. And if you don't want to tackle old speculative fiction, it's boring too. But I know most of you still on this thread might have use for the info.


(view spoiler)[
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg... is a goldmine for this book, and it's my first go-to source when working on SF (Speculative fiction, which includes a good deal of fantasy too, not just Sci-Fi)

Not sure we can use info directly from there, so I don't, and I suggest you guys don't either.

But they link to amazon for images where they can, and give pretty good bibliographic info to use for searching on abebooks and worldcat.

If you're not familiar with isfdb, if you click through to an edition, you'll see a list of citations with "Verified" or "Not Verified". You can click on each one's title in the left column to see what they are, but basically it means someone's checked that info against one of the sf "bibles", the big encyclopedias and bibliographies that used to get written before modern publishing made that all but impossible.

Which doesn't mean there's not another 150 more editions isfdb doesn't know about, but if you find one here, and it's got at least one verified checked off, you can be more or less 100% sure it really exists.

As mentioned, that makes finding them again on abebooks or wherever really a lot easier. Also as mentioned, don't grab their art directly, but ISFDB are about 50/50 with cover art if it's their own scans or Amazon's, but it's labelled if it's Amazon's, and I get a lot of covers that way for old sci-fi books (they link directly to it on Amazon's servers, which makes it kosher in my book to pinch for GR.)

(hide spoiler)]