Publication:CTYFTRTH1980

From ISFDB

This page is the wiki-page for the publication City of Truth. This page may be used for bibliographic comments or extended notes about the publication, or discussion on how the publication is to be recorded. The link above leads to the ISFDB publication record for CTYFTRTH1980. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

James Morrow, City of Truth, 1980 edition

Hi, Marc,

I saw you rejected my proposal to delete this one from the database. While I understand and support the notion that we should be growing, rather than pruning, here's the logic and research behind my proposal: 1.) City of Truth won the 1992 Nebula award for best novella. Had it been published in 1980, it would have been ineligible.

2.) Locus1 gives the following:

1. * *City of Truth (Legend 0-7126-3693-5, Jan ’91 [Dec ’90], £9.99, 104pp, hc, cover by Steve Crisp) Sf novella about a city where everyone has to tell the truth, illustrated throughout by Steve Crisp. Recommended. (PSP)
2. * _City of Truth (Legend 0-7126-4575-6, Jun ’91, £4.99, 104pp, tp, cover by Steve Crisp) Reprint (Legend 1991) sf novella.
3. * +City of Truth (St. Martin’s 0-312-07672-X, May ’92 [Apr ’92], $14.95, 104pp, hc, cover by Steve Crisp) Sf novella of a city where everyone must tell the truth, illustrated by Steve Crisp. First American edition (Legend 1991).
4. * _City of Truth (SFBC #01741, Jul ’92 [Aug ’92], $6.98, 104pp, hc, cover by Steve Crisp) Reprint (Legend 1991) sf novella of a city where everyone must tell the truth, illustrated by Steve Crisp. Similar to the 1992 St. Martin’s edition except it lacks an ISBN and price and the SFBC number is on the back jacket.
5. * _City of Truth (Harcourt Brace 0-15-618042-1, May ’93 [Apr ’93], $7.95, 144pp, tp, cover by Steven Cooley) Reprint (Legend 1990) sf novella of a city where everyone must tell the truth. Winner of a 1992 Nebula Award.

Had there been an earlier edition, they would likely have cited it, and omitted the "double star" for first publication on the Legend Jan '91 edition.

3.) Locus entry from contents of Nebula Awards 28, ed. James Morrow (Harcourt Brace 0-15-600039-3, Apr ’94, $12.95, 328pp, tp:

228 • City of Truth • James Morrow • na London: Legend, 1991

4.) From the British Library holdings:

System number 007403899

Author - personal Morrow, James, 1947-

Title City of truth.

Publisher/year Legend, 1991.

Physical descr. [128]p.

Subject Fiction in English American writers 1945- Texts

Holdings (All) Details

Shelfmark H.91/472

ISBN 0712645756 (pbk) : £4.50

0712636935 (cased) : £8.99

5.) Although the ISBN may be valid, it is not valid for Warner Books: 7126 is the publisher number for Legend, a Century imprint.

What do you think? (Scott Latham 16:45, 5 Feb 2007 (CST))

---

Just based on the fact that there are ten listings in Bookfinder leads me to believe the book physically exists with that ISBN on the barcode and that the record should not be deleted. However, I agree with you that something is very wrong with the ISFDB record.

It’s really unfortunate that ISFDB does not give us an audit trail for how data is getting into the database. For now we need to reverse engineer things.

I went back to bookfinder and stared at the results for ISBN 0712636870. There are ten books and here's a summary of the Publisher line:

• 2 Publisher: Century Pub. Co., 1980
• 5 Publisher: Legend, 1980
• 2 Publisher: Legend, 1990
• 1 Publisher: Time Warner Books UK, 1980

The first number on each line is the count of how many listings used that publisher line.

There are a couple of likely sources for the “1980”

1) Book sellers are using an application where they just scan the barcode and the app looks up data on sites like Amazon using AWS. :To verify this I looked at the three English Amazon sites.

• Amazon.com – Legend (January 1, 1980) (128 pages)
• Amazon.co.uk – Legend (1 Jan 1980) (128 pages)
• Amazon.ca – Time Warner Books UK (Jan 1 1980) (no page count)

That gives me a pretty comfortable feel for where the “Legend, 1980” and “Time Warner Books UK, 1980” entries could come from.

2) It’s possible the copyright date was printed wrong in the book. The book says 1980 when it should be 1990. To test this I then went to AbeBooks, looked up the title (188 results) and first searched for 1980. I did not find "1980" and so I then look for 1990 and see many listings for Century/Legend/St. Martins publications. AbeBooks does not include any listings for ISBN 0712636870 though.

Thus I suspect that while the book exists (based on ten bookfinder listings for the ISBN) that the publication date is either not stated (and people guess 1990 based on the copyright) or that it's 1991 or later.

I included the page count for the three Amazon listings because the book in ISFDB is listed as “Warner, 0-7126-3687-0, 128pp, hc” and I was trying to figure out the source of this ISFDB record. The page count must be from Amazon.com or .uk but that does not explain “Warner” as Amazon.ca has “Time Warner Books UK.”

What should be done about the publication record?

• Well, for starters let’s copy/paste our entire discussion into the bibliographic notes to give others the background on what research has been done.
• The date should be changed to 0000-00-00 (unknown date)
• The publisher should be changed to blank (or Century/Legend) as it’s clearly not Warner.
• A note gets added explaining that the publication may not exist and to see the bibliographic notes.

This would get the publication data in line with the verified publication records and hopefully at some point someone will show up with a physical copy.

The fact that the page count is 128 and that the sellers seem evenly distributed around the planet bothers me. The hc counts are 102/104 pages and the tp counts are 144 pages. Maybe we are dealing with a large print hc? The even distribution? I don't know what to make of that as usually you will see most listings for an ISBN from one country. Maybe it was only sold in international airport bookshops?

Marc Kupper (talk) 18:20, 5 Feb 2007 (CST)

Marc, I think my poor formatting obscured my first point, since you don't address it. To reiterate, City of Truth won the 1992 Nebula award for best novella. This means it was first published in 1991, so the 1980 records are spurious. I included the contents excerpt for Nebula 28 to reinforce the point, and note that James Morrow edited the book: I think he'd take care to get the citation right. (Scott Latham 20:31, 6 Feb 2007 (CST))

Scott, I had seen your comment about the Nebula Award and had changed the title record from 1980 to 1990 in response to that though am wondering if it should be 1991 as the story won the 1992 Nebula. The problem is that besides the 1980 record we've already discussed and there are two with a 1990 date, probably because the story copyright is 1990. The offending records are:

1. City of Truth, (1980 , James Morrow, Warner, 0-7126-3687-0, 128pp, hc)
2. City of Truth, (1990 , James Morrow, Century/Legend, 0-7126-3693-5, L9.99, 102pp, hc) Cover: Steve Crisp
3. City of Truth, (1990 , James Morrow, Legend, B000DCO9KM, hc)

• Number 1 has been beaten to death above and I had proposed to you an edit to the record - I went ahead with the edit
  • The date was changed from 1980-00-00 to 0000-00-00 (unknown date)
  • The publisher was changed from "Warner" to "Century/Legend" based on the ISBN
  • A note was added about looking at the bibliographic comments and this entire thread was copy/pasted into the comments.
  • This would get the publication data in line with the other publication records and hopefully at some point someone will show up with a physical copy.
• Number 2 - Amazon UK lists this as Jan 31, 1991 and Locus says Jan'91. I changed the date to 1991-01-00 and added a note explaining that it may be Feb-1991 because Amazon often has the on-sale-by date and not the publication date. It's 99% that it's Jan-1991 but I have a policy of never changing existing data unless I can absolutely prove it does not belong meaning that if I stated "January" based on secondary data I want the source of that data to be clear so that if someone has a physical copy of the book they can be comfortable with changing the January to something else if needed.
• Number 3 - That's an Amazon ASIN. Amazon says "Century (1990)" and nothing else. I suspect the record got added to Amazon as a result of a book club edition and those often don't state the printing date at all meaning someone used the copyright date. I decided to delete this ISFDB record.
• I changed the title date from 1990 to 1991-01-00 and also added a note about the short story this novel is based on.

At this point the City of Truth title record should be reasonably clean. Marc Kupper (talk) 03:30, 7 Feb 2007 (CST)