"a very short introduction"

Nobody is going to want to hear this, but Oxford's "A Very Short Introduction" series (numbering 500+ as of mid-2018) has at least one title that was published under another name and not in the series.

Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction has this note: ""Originally published as A Guide to the End of the World, this Very Short Introduction takes a timely and accessible look at global catastrophes, and shows that we should take nothing for granted."--BOOK JACKET."

I'm not touching it, but it is yet another series that proves the unworkability of the current distinction between "series" and "publisher series".

As with virtually any series put together by a publisher and encompassing many authors, there will inevitably be "leaks". Meaning that if one wants to follow LibraryThing's guidance about series versus publisher series, then one builds a publisher-initiated series with original works in "series" ... and then as soon as one of the authors reclaims their work, or the publisher publishes a work that was published somewhere else, everything has to be moved to "publisher series".

>2 Collectorator: There never was consensus on that point. A major impetus for the publisher series was to avoid someone complaining that their book is listed in a series when their particular edition isn't actually in the series.

It is also not clear that the "Very Short Introduction" series only publishes original works -- not works published somewhere else previously.

It seems a weird distinction to make -- that it was *first* published by a publisher, as opposed to, say, contemporaneously, or just after ... when there is a pretty obvious distinction to make, right there in the name: "publisher series" versus "series".

Laura

But in this case, the book mentioned was first published elsewhere. Therefore at least that book can only be in a publishers series.

It seems there may not be a perfect solution. But I think splitting a series between (Real) Series and Publisher Series is not the right one. So if there's a series -- and I think the Very Short Introse might be one -- where almost all the books are original to the series but one or two or just a few are grandmothered in from elsewhere then those Elsewheres can nestle in the Real Series without the sky falling...

There is a discussion of this series on the Non-Fiction Readers group: https://www.librarything.com/topic/192409

There I noticed one example of a title that was applied to two different works by different authors. The title Muhammad : a very short introduction has been applied to:

1. a 2001 reissue of a 1977 title from the "Past Masters" series: Muhammad by M(ichael) A. Cook.
2. a new work for the Very Short Introductions series, by Jonathan A.C. Brown, released in 2011.

According to one LT reviewer, the 2001 edition didn’t last very long. I haven't checked to see how this has been handled in the series.

BTW, Wikipedia has a helpful list of VSI titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Short_Introductions This list ignores the first Muhammad volume, only listing the one by Brown.

> 6 The sky isn't falling over any of these definitions. But allowing "just a few" or "almost all" is adding even more murkiness to a definition that's already hard to parse. The only real solution is to clean up the treatment of series.

Fundamentally we're talking about the distinction between edition-series and work-series. It's not easy to pull that out in a Common Knowledge field, which is why this doesn't really fit well.