[DCRM-L] Sammelband, Omnibus, Nonce

Fri Jan 4 09:08:39 MST 2013

The usage goes back at least to Greg’s bibliography of drama up to the restoration.  Carter’s ABC doesn’t include it.

Fredson Bowers, in “The function of bibliography,” (https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/5844/librarytrendsv7i4c_opt.pdf?sequence=4), writes (pp. 500-501): 
It may come as something of a shock to the cataloger, trained to record only the characteristics of the copy before him, to be faced with the paradox that in some occasional instances the bibliographer's "ideal copy" may very likely never have been issued in any concrete example by a publisher. On the one hand, therefore, the cataloger may be busy describing the single copy at hand, whereas the bibliographer may be concerned to analyze and describe, at the other end of the process, a copy that does not exist. Most commonly this odd split in theory and procedure occurs when parts of a book have been separately printed and are joined in random combinations by the binder.  The simplest example ordinarily met with is the nonce collection - such as those made from any available Dryden quartos between 1691 and 1695-in which a group of independent books designed for separate sale is formed for issue as a collection under a general title- page. Intermediate would be the 1611 to 1617 Spenser Folios described by F. R. Johnson in his Spenser bibliography, in which reprinted sheets complicate the changing combinations of editions collected. 

I suggested the term for the RBMS thesauri back in September 2009; it doesn’t seem to have been acted on as yet.

The term “nonce collection” has occasionally been used in the same sense as “Sammelband” is widely used (at least by incunabulists), i.e. a group of separately published items bound together subsequent to publication, by an owner rather than a bookseller-publisher, and without a printed title page or contents list (though they often have such in manuscript), but I don’t find this to be very common.  Nicholas Pickwoad urges using the phrase “composite volume” for such collections, which has the virtue of not using a German term in English, when the German usage may vary from what is intended in English.  (And would avoid the awkward English plural “Sammelbands” found in the RBMS Provenance Thesaurus, with a reference from the German “Sammelbände”.

Aside from this occasional confusion (not unheard of in other bibliographical terminologies), the phrase “nonce collection” seems to me a very useful one to describe the collection of multiple separately-published items (almost always short pamphlets) by a bookseller-publisher, usually furnished with a collective title page, sometimes with a contents list.  Each instance of the collection may (and often does) vary in content - at least in the edition of any given component, sometimes in the number of items included.

John Lancaster

P.S.  Thanks to Mac Mail’s search function, I find I wrote on this on ExLibris a couple of years ago; here’s what I said (apologies for repetition, like Mark Twain, I don’t have time to write a shorter version):

By a ‘nonce collection’, I mean a collection of separately published works put together by a bookseller/publisher with a collective title page (and sometimes other preliminaries).  Different copies of such collections may at times contain different editions of the individual works – it’s generally assumed that this was a way of trying to move stock.  It’s also a way to put together a “collected works” or “collected sermons” without the expense of reprinting them.

Search for instance in ESTC “fielding dramatic works 1755” – you get the collection under that title, plus records for all the separate works that made up the collection, with a note “also issued in …” (or some such wording).  “Synge works 1740” will bring up a similar batch (many of which were printed by William Bowyer, who also printed the collective titles).

See Arthur Freeman on the subject: http://library.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/s5-XVIII/1/51.pdf  [But his examples are sort of counter-examples, since they don’t for the most part include a title page, and the evidence for collective issue is thus circumstantial rather than documentary.  Still, he makes clear how the term is used.]

The usage goes back at least to Greg’s bibliography of drama up to the restoration.  Carter’s ABC doesn’t include it.

In at least 1869 and 1871, Fields, Osgood, & Co. (1869) and then their successor James R. Osgood and Co. (1871) issued a collection with a general title page, Companion Poets, which included three works also separately published: Whittier’s National Lyrics, 1869, published by Field, Osgood, & Co.; Bryant’s Voices of Nature, published by Appleton (in 1869, the 1868 printing was included; in 1871, it was the 1865 printing – at least in the copies I’ve seen); and Holmes’s Humorous Poems, 1869, Field, Osgood, & Co.

These publishers also put out at least one other collection with the same title, Companion Poets, but collecting three different works.  I’ve only seen the Google Books copy, with an 1871 title page, including an 1865 Longfellow, an 1871 Tennyson, and an 1871 Browning.

There are OCLC records (indicating that the collections started with Ticknor & Fields, and that there was quite a bit of variation in the dates of printing of the individual works included) at #19941975, #12429242, #21095102, #187311751, #58885510, #191281690, #9657799, #21095054, #37000939, #316951914, #27026578, #27046526.  Also several for electronic versions: #262632885, #256744107, #68767711, #325823654.

That is, the phenomenon wasn’t limited to pre-1800 printing.  I suspect it was less common later – but then, if we had the means to gather information about such collections, maybe we’d find it’s more common than I imagine now. 

John Lancaster

On Jan 4, 2013, at 10:39 AM, "Noble, Richard" <richard_noble at brown.edu> wrote:

> 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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