Original publication date for a work originally published in a collection

[Bob]

This may have been asked and answered already, but since I can't find an answer . . . . This is complicated, so please bear with me.

Recently I came across an old post saying that if you have two or more books that have been combined in a collection or "omnibus", the "original publication date" (OPD) for the collection should be the latest of the OPDs for the individual books.

Example: Nevada Barr Collection: Blood Lure, Hunting Season, Flashback. This collection was first published in 2004, but the original works were published in 2001, 2002, and 2003. So the OPD for the collection, according to the rule above, should be 2003, not 2004.

I wasn't aware of this rule, and would like to know if I have got it right - but it's just the background to my actual question.

My question is actually about the reverse situation: sometimes a work is published individually *after* it originally appeared as part of a collection.

Example: Balzac's The Ball At Sceaux was originally published in 1830, apparently as part of a collection entitled Scenes de la Vie Privee, which contained six other stories or novellas by Balzac. The Ball At Sceaux was not published as a stand-alone, as far as I can tell, until much later - perhaps as late as 1919.

So my question is: Is the OPD for The Ball At Sceaux 1830, when it was published in a collection, or is it 1919, when it was (let's assume) first published as a stand-alone?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Bob wrote: "So the OPD for the collection, according to the rule above, should be 2003, not 2004."

Correct.


Bob wrote: "Is the OPD for The Ball At Sceaux 1830, when it was published in a collection, or is it 1919, when it was (let's assume) first published as a stand-alone?"

1830. That's when that book was first published, regardless of what form it took at that time.

[Bob]

Thanks!

[Lobstergirl]

Ugh. This seems very counterintuitive. The date any book was published should be the date that book was published. Not the last year some segment in that book was published.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

We're talking about original publication date, not the pub date of an edition. So the date that work was first published. Otherwise you have insane things like a book published in omnibus for the first time having a first pub date 100 years after the last of the books that comprise it.

[Lobstergirl]

Oh. Hmm. Actually it still bothers me. The original publication date of an omnibus should be the original pub. date of the omnibus. What do the experts say about this? Catalogers, Library of Congress?

[Bob]

I think I understand where you're coming from, Lobstergirl. Many of the GR rules, especially re combining editions, seem to adhere to an overarching principle of "a book is a book is a book," whether that book is a single story or a collection.

I'm OK with Rivka's call, though (not that my vote necessarily counts), for three reasons.

1. I find the date of the last-published work in the collection to be a more useful piece of data - if I want to sort an author's works by the order in which they appeared, for example.

2. The OPD of an individual work is frequently available on the copyright page, or in common Internet sources. Particularly with classic authors, it seems to be much harder to find out when a particular combination of works first appeared as a collection.

3. I'm also thinking that, with the explosion of e-publishing, the "book is a book" principle is going to get harder to maintain. In the future (or maybe even now, I'm not an e-book reader yet), I may be able to create my own "anthology" by selecting various stories from one (or more) author(s) and buying them as a discounted package. What does this do to the definition of a "book"? For this reason, too, I'm not as concerned any more about strict adherence to "a book is a book".

[Lobstergirl]

That makes me even more concerned.

A lot of times on the "editions" page for a classic work, you'll see e-books with publication dates of, say, 1840, 1860 etc. No, that's not when the e-book was published. Even Nabu and other public domain publishers have the common sense to put a current publication date on their hardcopy editions, and they're just basically xeroxing and reprinting some 19th century edition.

[Bob]

Lobstergirl wrote: "That makes me even more concerned.

A lot of times on the "editions" page for a classic work, you'll see e-books with publication dates of, say, 1840, 1860 etc. No, that's not when the e-book was ..."

I'm not sure I follow. I thought we were talking about *original* publication dates. Why shouldn't Nabu's re-publication of, say, Moby Dick, have the same OPD - 1851 or whenever -- as the original edition?

[Lobstergirl]

It should. I was referring to edition publication date.