User talk:Pwinning

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G. Peter Winnington‎
I have moved this page from Author:G. Peter Winnington‎ to Bio:G. Peter Winnington‎, as we now place all biographical sketches in the "Bio:" namespace in this wiki.

Please note that if a Wikipedia article about G. Peter Winnington‎ is created (none appears to exist on the english-language wikipedia at present) the ISFDB has a facility to support linking to it from. I note that not all of his relevant works appear to have been entered -- if you have copies or other information, you might want to update the actual database records. The links above will help you if you choose to do this. if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to leave a question at the Help desk. -DES Talk 16:58, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake
I have a couple of your submissions on hold. Both of these are updates to Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake where you want to
 * Change the date from 1999-00-00 to 2000-01-14 for both the publication and title record.
 * Change the title in the title record from Vast Alchemies: The Work of Mervyn Peake to Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake (adding the words "Life and " to the title)

Do you have a copy of this publication? The reason I ask is that the date we use in ISFDB is the printing date as stated in the publication. Sometimes that's not available but it's quite rare that the date will include the day of the month which is why I'm asking about the source for the date you used. Related to this is there's quite a wide range of dates available for this publication.
 * ISFDB has 1999-00-00
 * The ISFDB publication notes say "Oct1999"
 * Amazon.com has June 2000
 * Amazon.co.uk has 17 Feb 2000
 * Amazon.ca has Scholarly Book Services Inc (Jun 27 2002)
 * AbeBooks sellers seem to be using both 1999 (two copies available) and 2000 (seven copies available)
 * Oddly, while all three Amazon sites report this as 263 pages the AbeBooks sellers are reporting, 263 pages. 8 pages of b&w plates, 256 pgs, and 288 pages. I suspect it's close to 256 pages plus 8 pages of prints which would be 264 pages. ISFDB has this as 270 pages.

I'm wondering if we have UK and USA printings as the USA list price is reported as $43.95 while UK is £18.95. Locus reports two printings with Feb 2000, £18.95 and Aug 2000, $39.95 with the USA version also having the note "This is the 1999 Peter Owen UK edition." I suspect what happened here is there was a planned Oct-1999 release that got pushed to Feb-2000 and the USA release got pushed from June to August 2000. The USA edition was reviewed in the December-2000 Locus which reports reviewing the Aug-2000 copy.

Hopefully you have a copy of one of the publications and we can work on getting the ISFDB record to match your copy or to clone it if you have the USA edition.

For now I have accepted your change to the title as Vast Alchemies: The Life and Work of Mervyn Peake seems to be the correct title. If you have a copy of the publication then please look at the title page to see if perhaps Vast Alchemies: The Life of Mervyn Peake is used there or if that was a typo in ISFDB plus very few other places. Marc Kupper (talk) 00:53, 21 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Pwinning - It just dawned on me that you are probably the author G. Peter Winnington. :-) In general, what we try to do here on ISFDB is to have the publication records state exactly what's shown in the publications. Sometimes information is not stated in the publication and in that case we can use secondary sources but will cite the source used.


 * If two printings can be distinguished in some way then we will have two records in ISFDB. It appears that for the USA there may be a second or third printing with the first at $39.95 and the current printing available at $43.95. If that's the case we'd create a new publication record (by cloning the first printing) to note the new price. This assumes the price is stated on the publication. To reply to this message just click the "Edit" link above and add your replies below this, indenting it with two colons (you'll see how I indented this message which you are in edit mode). Marc Kupper (talk) 01:03, 21 June 2008 (UTC)


 * omg -- all these comments have been waiting for four years for my input. Apologies.
 * Re Vast Alchemies, the correct publication date is 14 Jan 2000 (because of the concurrent release of the BBC adaptation of the first two of Peake's Titus books) and, yes, it was postponed from the fall of 1999. There was only the British hardback printing; US copies were imported from the UK (and the US price killed sales). Extent: it does indeed contain 263 numbered pages, plus 8 pages of photographs between pages 160 and 161.
 * The book was reissued by Peter Owen in a revised and enlarged edition (paperback only) in September 2009, at £14.99, retitled Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies: the illustrated biography. ISBN 978-0-7206-1371-4. Extent 314 pages; abundant illustrations (some in colour), including on the inside of the card cover (front and and back). Fyi the original photographic section was dropped because Getty images wanted far too much money for the repro rights. Instead al the images are artwork by Peake. (NB All information taken from printed copies of the books.)
 * For some reason I have not been able to edit the page about this book. Even though I log in, the "edit" tab does not appear. Would you like to make them for me? Thanks! Pwinning 09:15, 3 April 2012 (UTC)