Real Books (The Real Book About...)

I was so pleased to come upon another of this series, after quite a few years of not seeing anything I didn't already have. The book I found is The Real Book about Amazing Animals by Alec Dickinson. So then I was wondering, who else is collecting this nice little series? IS there a way to determine who collects a series from looking at the series' page?

I added a few numbers to the Real Books series page based on the list on an inner surface of a DJ I have on hand for Real Book of Amazing Scientific Facts. The trade editions have the book numbers on the spine. The more common book clubs usually don't. The same pattern is followed for series like the Happy Hollisters.

To answer the question about collectors of a given series, I think you'd have to look at individual book pages and see if there are names that repeat among multiple titles. There is a list of members who have contributed to the series data but this does not always translate to collectors. For example, I don't collect the series specifically but have a couple of them when the author or topic is right. Yet, I have made a bunch of edits so show up on the list.

James

>2 Collectorator:, >3 Keeline:

I do have the dust jacket for it...I am pretty sure it's not a book club edition...but unfortunately the price is clipped at the top. And there's a matching clip at the bottom (is that where the number would be?). Guess I should check some of my other Real Books and see where the series number is.

Hmmm. I have two sizes of Real Books...the larger ones' jackets say book club. The smaller ones have a number at the bottom left, although that's not consistent either...the Rangers' code is bottom right. And two of them have the same code, so what's up with that! I only have four of the smaller size that have jackets...

Treasure Hunting 008-014
Making Dolls 80-140
Texas Rangers 008-014...and at the top, above the price is RBATR

And then the Amazing Animals, which is a smaller size like the ones above, does not have any words, code or otherwise.

#4 by SaintSunniva>

Numbers at the bottom of the front flap of the dust jacket are the age range for the text. Hence, "008-014" or "80-140" are two ways publishers express ages 8 to 14.

The "RBATR" is the abbreviation of the title "Real Book About the Texas Rangers".

The trade editions are shorter than the book clubs. My copy of Real Book of Amazing Scientific Facts is just under 8 inches tall (213 mm).

A volume number appears on the bottom of the spine of the dust jacket for trade editions, "Rxx" where "xx" is the number with one or two digits.

I added numbers for at least a dozen titles on my edit of the list.

Back in the 1990s when I managed a store that specialized in old children's books, I compiled lists on spreadsheets for all of the major nonfiction series like these as well as the contents of Best in Children's Books, etc. I don't have that information here or now. It stayed with the store when I left in 2000.

I might be able to recreate the research needed to put volumes on the list. Until today, I didn't know that the LT series information was incomplete in this area.

James

Oh Keeline!!! I love learning these little details! 08--014...so obvious now that you've pointed it out!

There's a delightful book Who Should We Then Read?...my 2001 copy has many of the vintage children's series in it, but alas, not the Real Books.

>7 Collectorator: Collectorator, what am I looking at? I see The Real Book About Stars, and the covers...oh. You must mean that one random yellow cover, right? Is that the digital copy?

>10 Collectorator:
I thought that LT displays the most popular cover... apparently not! I agree, this is annoying.

>7 Collectorator: Yes, that SUCKS. This site is supposed to celebrate the book, not make them all look like one gelatinous mess.

>15 Collectorator: What do you mean? The authors are listed with the titles on the series page...

13>

How would you 'fix' the problem, in general?

These vintage books that have a single "real" cover for an ISBN-less paper edition and that have been re-issued in an electronic edition with an ISBN and a "placeholder" cover are a corner case. Tell me how you would get your preferred cover to display in this edition and still have the most commonly used cover for the most commonly used ISBN show on the work page for other cases, without requiring anybody to manually set the work-level cover and thus creating edit wars between people wanting different covers to appear on the work page. If you have a coherent RSI, rather than a "This is ugly" complaint, then suggest it.

Yeah, the placeholder's ugly, but it's hardly turning all books into a "gelatinous mass". Add the book to your library if you're that concerned about which cover you see. Those of us who don't have it and who care about it can see the cover you like in the set of all covers.

19>

I care about the general issue of "getting the correct cover to display on the work page with the minimum of human intervention." This is a sub-class of that, so I care, but I don't want the solution for this particular version of the problem to break the general case.

Are you suggesting that "null ISBN" should be counted as an ISBN, so that if the majority of books for a particular work have no ISBN, then the cover most commonly associated with non-ISBN books should prevail?

I think Collectorator just wants it to be the cover of the most popular "edition" wins. What is that though. Is it the cover chosen by most people within that "edition"? Does Tim keep track of that info? Isn't the cover used on the series page always an Amazon cover though? So Collectorator's RSI would include the work to allow user-uploaded covers on the series page, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to look at any editions without an ISBN.

"Most popular" is perhaps easy to program but it is usually the least satisfactory. In this and many other cases we see lots of made up covers for ebook or print-on-demand editions.

Older series like the Rover Boys are saturated with this kind of cover that is not very helpful at all. Compare that with real cover scans from my collection.

In some series the illustrated dust jacket would be the most interesting to see, yet if most people cataloging the volume care nothing about the cover and get the generic default or show their jacket-less copies.

On this particular series, the Real Books, I don't know if there are really electronic copies. However, somewhere there are some generated generic covers for books where they don't have covers, say in a library or bookseller data source.

In the best world I'd have an option (which the system remembers) to show my covers any time I view a series or author page, just like when I view my own library. Secondary to this would be to show the most popular cover first (for caching reasons) and then let me click a button or link to view my covers.

Since series information is a crowd sourced Common Knowledge activity, it seems reasonable to give us a chance to pick one of the covers available (or upload one) and let it stick until changed. We do this with Canonical Titles, Series and Series Order information.

Since much of my collecting activity includes filling in series or author lists, I would also like the ability to export a series or author page in OPML format for use with outline programs like Carbonfin Outliner on the iOS devices. There are other programs that use this XML standard for outlines. It is fairly simply defined so should not be enormously difficult to code, including checkmarks if I have the item. Probably others would find this useful once it was made available.

Of course, this thread isn't an RSI so it is just kicking some ideas around.

James

>14 Collectorator: Collectorator, thank you for answering my question.

" No. There USED to be. But they took that away. I miss it."

Me, too.

I remember saying something to someone on LT about the cover images-which I love. (I used to let people know I'd uploaded a cover image if it was for a book that didn't have any images available. I no longer bother.) I love looking at them! In my library, and the series pages...yeah. I like those covers. And this person was like, whatever. They didn't care one bit about them. That wasn't what LT was to them. But it is to me. In an old series like Real Books (pre-isbn) the top cover image on the series' page should be the dust jacket one, even if most of the copies on LT don't have a jacket.

That's what I'd like.

In an old series like Real Books (pre-isbn) the top cover image on the series' page should be the dust jacket one, even if most of the copies on LT don't have a jacket.

How do you define, in an automated way, a "pre-isbn series", given that the cover issue here is due to an ISBN? How do you define what the "dust jacket image" is in a way that does not require human intervention for every single cover image to label it as "dust jacket" or not? How do you deal with the issue that even older (and thus obviously also pre-ISBN) books will not have had dust jackets at all, and later but still pre-ISBN reprints will? I'm starting to think that this request is less about accuracy and more about PRETTY, in which case I'm less sympathetic; just put the book in your library and look at the pretty pictures all you want.

28>

Yeah, you said that already. Nobody's saying that here, though; I'm saying that the way the request is formulated makes it very difficult to solve without screwing up other things, and that if you do care (especially if, as it appears, it's purely about aesthetics rather than anything that can be determined in an objective manner) the best solution is probably to add the book to your own library.

Looking specifically at the books in this series that have the generic covers, I picked The Real Book about Stars and found that there's an Amazon listing from Kessinger (a common reprint house for print on demand books) so I'd say that "publisher" is the source of these generic covers, listing them through Amazon.

I don't know if these reprints are legitimate (i.e. authorized). Generally Kessinger reprints PDFs they find on Archive.org and Google Books. They are certainly "new" copies.

I have the same problem on Google Books where old, public domain in the U.S., books have the old scanned copies blocked because some outfit, like Kessinger, has posted for sale a "new" copy with a recent year (even though they are not entitled to a new copyright on a public domain work, only on any new content such as illustrations, introduction, footnote--which they have none). Google, who is so gun shy from the lawsuits, blocks all of the copies, even the ones from 100+ year old books scanned from libraries which are positively public domain.

Given the way Kessinger seems to operate, many books that are listed as "available" from them may not have been actually printed for anyone. It's a stretch to call these "real" books in the traditional authorized published sense.

On this series, I think all of the titles are pre-1967 so pre-ISBN. I don't think they were published into the 1960s where by they'd get ISBNs on newer editions as might happen with a series like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew where an old title stays in print long enough to get an ISBN generated for it.

When you look at the page for The Real Book about Stars you can see the vintage cover illustrations.

I imagine that because the ISBN is attached to the work, and many LT users use whatever default image is associated with a book, the generic Kessinger cover (yellow background with a feather and a computer-rendered title on the image) "wins" the popularity contest.

Exploring deeper, I find that there are 22 members with The Real Book About Stars according to the members with work page, specifically:

Rileyslesson, sigurd, jpblib, GilbertStaples, lulaa, cng12345, booklady1951, circadia, Excataloger, SaintSunniva, mr._sammy, SteamboatBruce, AConder, AmCorKragujevac, BettcherForrest, Saltraker, gcbclibrary, paraventur, GwenH, catofshadow, TheBookStop

I opened each of these links in tabs and searched for the book. I found some curious things.

One of them (TheBookStop) (4.5%) has the Kessinger cover displayed in their library.

Eight (Rileyslesson, sigurd, cng12345, Excataloger, AConder, AmCorKragujevac, paraventur, catofshadow) of 22 (36%) had only a generic LT cover attached to the title. They didn't care about this part of cataloging at the time they entered their book.

Five (lulaa, circadia, SaintSunniva, mr._sammy, gcbclibrary) of 22 (23%) selected an image that shows a book without a dust jacket. There may be multiple images among these that simply look similar.

Three (jpblib, booklady1951, GwenH) of 22 (14%) selected an image that shows the dust jacket for this title. There may be multiple images here too.

Most puzzling is that four (GilbertStaples, SteamboatBruce, BettcherForrest, Saltraker) of the 22 (18%) don't even list the book anymore in their catalog yet LT is showing them as having the book on the members with work page. It seems that info is not being kept up to date.

To summarize:

4.5% has Kessinger cover
14% has book with DJ cover
18% doesn't even list the book anymore!
23% has book without DJ cover
36% has no cover assigned

Yet, what do we get for this title? We get the Kessinger generic computer-generated cover.

A better way to handle this would be to let the LT members who edit series pages (or work-level data) be able to pick the default cover that is displayed on series and author pages. It can be different for individual members of course in the usual way.

James

As things now stand, as noted, the ISBN cover wins.

Am I right that the RSI would be that works get the most popular cover absolutely?

Then someone is going to complain that on such and such a series a non-English cover wins.

>33 MarthaJeanne: True, they might, but then can't the same happen now anyway? I have a few less well-known books that the work title that wins is German, therefore that cover should win also.

I think most popular should win regardless of ISBN. There's never going to be a way for complete unanimous agreement unless it were able to be individually set, because there will always be some potential fault, but I think most popular seems like the best bet for most cases.

#32 by timspalding> works get the most popular cover absolutely?

Excluding, of course, flagged covers.

32>

Yes, as I understand it, but it's not my RSI.

I've got nothing useful to contribute, but I just want to put in a good word for "the pretty", not just because it's pretty, but because it carries lots of information with it--indications of period, style, illustration, typography, design, topic. It's pretty, and it's interesting. Looking at the example in >24 Keeline:, it does seem a crying shame to have Keeline's lovely covers buried under POD junk.

I don't suppose there could be some general user-choice option, "see pretty covers" or not?

#32 by timspalding>

Lots of things are popular but popular is not the same as best or most appropriate. In the case of The Real Book About Stars in my example, the result would be unsatisfactory even if the LT members who no longer have a copy were excluded. The most popular cover is no cover at all (generic LT cover). If that could be excluded, it would be the book without DJ (assuming that they all point to the same image, which they probably don't since I see two DJ images and two book cover images for this title).

If at all possible, I advocate for a selection system. Yes, there may be some tug-o-war over which ones to use and someone may go through and pick all of their own, despite anything that resembles a consensus.

This could be ameliorated if there was an option to show one's own covers on a series and author page of this type in addition to the system's default, whatever it should be.
_____

I prefer to not see a generic cover such as an uninspired print-on-demand effort from one of the sausage-mill type of PoD "publishers" (some do much better, of course).

I also don't wish to see a generic LT cover representing the members who made no selection at all.

Members who no longer have the book in their catalog should not be part of any popularity listing if it must be done that way. That can lead to abuse once someone figures it out.

James

Another example of series page vs. collection

The pretty old covers are under-represented for the Aunt Jane's Nieces series written by L. Frank Baum under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne.

Here's the series page:
http://www.librarything.com/series/Aunt+Jane%27s+Nieces

Here's my catalog page showing all the original covers:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?tag=AJN&offset=0&view=2wonderY&a...

I'll bet the Kindle/POD owners would far rather have the old covers showing, if they think about it.

37>

Not having the POD junk I can understand and agree with. The "The dust jacket cover should always be used even if the majority of copies that have no ISBN use a non-dust-jacket cover" is the one that I think is about aesthetics over information, and that would be enormously complicated. "Most popular wins, regardless of ISBN" is easy to implement and solves the "POD junk" problem.

#41

Cool!

#42

Print-on-demand

44>

I have lots of words in my vocabulary for things I don't want....

Hey now, POD isn't just for crap. There are legit authors (like them or not) who release smaller things that way, when they're not expecting thousands of sales, so it enables those who want it to buy it, without worrying about the publishers and their demand for X orders before they'll even consider running it, etc. ...They also have actual covers on their work.

Anyway.

Oh, I certainly didn't mean that the contents are crap (necessarily). But to anyone interested in antiquarian books, such as were discussed in this thread, or real books of any description, and especially obscure titles, PoDs are quickly becoming the bane of book-shopping, as the ratio of noise to real editions escalates. A lot of unscrupulous skunks are printing stuff off Gutenberg and even Wikipedia articles--and not cheaply! Asking forty-fifty dollars for a computer printout is routine to these people.

At least Abebooks gives one an option to exclude PoD from searches (it still depends on honest categorisation by the seller--a lot don't bother), but Amazon doesn't. Search for an obscure title on Amazon and this junk pops up.

Unfortunately, not even Abe excludes bloody e-books and PDFs from searches, which is the next big plague.

Awwww! That's a great collection!

>47 LolaWalser: Yeah, I certainly agree there. I always tick off that option when they wind up in a search (on Abe).

I find that Print on Demand publishing is quite often a path of least resistance for those who want to make fast money. As I mentioned above, the usual method involves taking a Project Gutenberg text or a PDF from Archive.org or Google Books and sending it to a PoD or eBook distribution channel (at no cost to them) in a "hoist the flag and see if anybody salutes" method of sales (or "throw mud at the wall and see if anything sticks").

At the same time, I use PoD myself (24 Palmer Street Press) to produce first book editions of texts by Edward Stratemeyer with extensive footnotes, illustrations and introductions that have caused them to be well reviewed in the journals for the fields of dime novels and juvenile series books.

For my first one the Dime Novel Round-Up editor wrote:

"the most significant publication in the field of juvenile series books to appear this year...belongs on the shelf of every series book collector and reader."

The editor of Newsboy, the Horatio Alger Jr. Society newsletter wrote:

"a handsome, reasonably priced book...this is a quality production, worthy of a traditional mainline publisher."

I, too, know that PoD can be used for good material. Too much of it is slap dash and what I have seen of Kessinger books suggests to me that they get whatever they can find, and put it out until they are told that they don't have rights to issue a given book.

PoD is a legitimate way to distribute certain texts but I find that their existence fills up my searches for the used book databases and eBay. Now it is filling up certain results on LT. I can't stop the other two but I can make my suggestions here.

James

>51 Keeline: Yes, it does wind up very full of reproduced junk, definitely not denying that. Everyone was just piling on that "eew POD = trash" bandwagon so I had to jump in. ;)

What does RSI mean?

Ah. Not Repetitive Stress Injury, then.

Technically it's "Recommended Site Improvements," the name of the group where said improvements can be recommended.

(edited to add link)

Here's a beautiful tag page: http://www.librarything.com/tag/Harvard+Classics (and its just as beautiful publisher series). /sarcasm

Most of those have very few ISBNs editions, and in most cases I checked, the total users with a particular ISBN was fewer than the total members using the most popular member-uploaded cover.

>57 omargosh: Depressing. And wrong.

Back to my original topic, though, I only recently heard that there's a Jazz title, and a Negro title in the Real Book About series. I'm almost done finding all of another series I collect (Best in Children's Books), and I see that TRBA series is next. You've heard it here, first

>32 timspalding: That absolutely doesn't work for the Pathfinder books, as the publisher creates a fake cover for advertising and doesn't have the real cover ready until they're sending it to the publisher, so the Amazon ISBN cover is invariably wrong.

>3 Keeline: I know this post is super old, but I just wanted to thank you for adding volume numbers to the Real Books series. I used to rely on the listings in Reshelving Alexandria, but since that data has gone away I have been having a hard time finding info on these old children's series. I'm so glad to find this source of info! Thanks to you and all the others who put in so much time to bring accuracy and completeness to these listings!

>60 SaraCrewe2: That does go back a ways (2014). :) I'm glad to help where I can and gratified that it helps others.

In the 1990s (1988-2000 specifically) I managed a store that specialized in old children's books. Since a lot of our clients were interested in filling in blanks in lists, we built and provided lists to them. Some lists were more challenging to build than others, of course. Then, when someone was making a bibliography (like Little Golden Books/Wonder Books/Elf Books, etc.) we could enhance their information with the items we had seen.

When I left the store those lists did not come with me and I regret that. So I've had to build new ones for the areas of interest. I don't have all that I did back then though. For some I might have at least a strategy for how to rebuild them when needed.

James