User talk:BillLongley

The First Men in the Moon, The World Set Free and Short Stories
Bill, you entered "You have to be kidding on a book this old" in the ISBN field for "The First Men in the Moon, The World Set Free and Short Stories". Keep in mind that this field is also used to capture pre-ISBN catalog IDs (not the best way of doing it IMO, but I lost this argument months ago), so it's entirely possible that there may be something useful that we could enter here. I have also removed "Priceless" from the "Price" field and "Seriously: there's a lot of "Odhams Press Limited" editions to add." from the "Note" field for obvious reasons :) Ahasuerus 18:27, 26 Feb 2007 (CST)


 * There really is no numbering of any kind, nor date, nor price... these are volumes I inherited from my grandfather and pre-date any of the "useful info will be provided" conventions publishers adopted later.
 * Glad to see you spotted it though, I like to keep the mods on their toes occasionally... ;-)   BillLongley 07:37, 27 Feb 2007 (CST)


 * Describe the book as accurately as possible in the notes field so that it can be distinguished from other editions. This AbeBooks Search finds 17 copies (Bookfinder has 19 copies), 16 of which are Odhams editions, and it looks like there were editions in 1930, and 1950, the undated one, a "5th edition", and different covers (red cloth, blue cloth, marbled cover & endpapers, Gilt titles on spine. Blind stamped portrait on cover, etc.). What I did not do was to parse carefully through the list to see exactly how many editions there seem to be but I believe it's three. Plus - the short stories could be listed which seem to be The Inexperienced Ghost, The New Accelerator, Mr Ledbetter's Vacation, and A Dream of Armageddon.  The First Men in the Moon, The World Set Free and Short Stories. Marc Kupper (talk) 18:35, 27 Feb 2007 (CST)


 * I've added the remainder of what can be gathered from the volume itself, and copy'n'pasted the nearest description from the Abebooks search you pointed me at. (And added physical size.) This is a lazy editor's nightmare - no copyright page, no publication history, contents lists placed almost randomly: e.g. only when you get to page 173 do you discover the contents list that says there was a preface on page 169! Page 313 tells you what the remaining short stories are: page 315 then lists them again as a "Contents list" with page numbers. Other contents lists tell you exactly what every chapter is called.
 * Effort-wise, adding the short stories is slightly more difficult than usual, finding an interesting essay was maybe worth the effort (as it places the date at 1921 or later), but trying to figure out how many editions there actually ARE is out of my scope: I'm not actually that interested in the number/format/price/cover-art of editions, but I AM interested in what words appear where. I have another dozen volumes of H.G. Wells that appear to be from the same series of Omnibus editions, but I'm making them low priority: I doubt I'll find a previous unknown story, or correct a typo that's been propagated incorrectly for years: something I frequently find in other work I do here. BLongley 16:51, 28 Feb 2007 (CST)