[DCRM-L] Sammelband, Omnibus, Nonce

[Noble, Richard]

The subject line is a formula for raising biblio-terminological imps. See
the forwarded item of correspondence below. - Richard Noble

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Noble, Richard <richard_noble at brown.edu>
Date: Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: Terminology
To: ...

Dear ... ,

There really is no single substitute word or phrase for the thing that we
Anglo-American bibliographer types call a  *sammelband *(usually treated
typographically--lower case, roman--as a loan word). In fact "omnibus
volume" is by definition just what a sammelband *isn't*: per Webster 3, "a
book containing reprints of a number of works (as of a single author or on
a single subject or related subjects)". Since "reprints" is one of those
slippery words that even too many librarians don't correctly understand, I
rather like the definition given in

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/omnibus

"a printed anthology of the works of one author or of writings on related
subjects".

I suppose the lack of an unambiguous English-language term has to do with
the fact that few people confront a sammelband in their daily lives.

To add to the complexity of all this, it appears (from the same "Free
Dictionary") that a *Sammelband*, to a German, is an omnibus volume: "ein
Buch, das Texte eines oder verschiedener Autoren enthält *Der Sammelband
enthält Beiträge verschiedener, sehr namhafter Autoren*". Indeed, my
Cassell's German to English dictionary *defines* Sammelband as "an omnibus
volume". Moreover, neither Webster nor OED has an entry for "sammelband",
the upshot being that the meaning that we have assigned to the word has no
lexical authority outside our little circle.

Given that degree of linguistic conflict, and that the object in question
is almost always a bound-up collection of pamphlets, and that "pamphlet"
clearly denotes a discrete physical object, the better term might be
"pamphlet volume". In other contexts one might prefer "bound collection of
plays" or "bound volume of separately published poems".

There's a related phenomenon that wants a designation: separate
publications, often of multiple dates but usually with the imprint of the
same publisher or printer, reissued as a single volume with a collective
title page. I was taught to call this a "nonce collection", perhaps given
the now rather archaic use of "for the nonce" to mean "for the purpose",
i.e. for the purpose of selling the pieces together. (See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammelband).

We cataloguers have our "with" note, "bound together subsequent to
publication", for a ... hmm ... sammelband; it's rather a mouthful. I'm not
aware of any such fixed formula to describe a ... uhh ... nonce collection.

I wish this were an entirely trivial question, but those of us who deal
with these objects ought to be able to talk about them coherently. I'm
going to forward this to DCRM-L, to see whether any fellow RB cats have
come up with an elegant formulation. (Note: "Sammelband" is in the index of
RAK, pointing to §107.4, but the available pdf

ftp://ftp.ddb.de/pub/standardisierung/regelwerke/rak-wb/RAK_WB_ErgLfg4.pdf

omits everything before §117.3)

Does this help??

Best wishes,

Richard

RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOKS CATALOGER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-3384 : RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU
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