[DCRM-L] Sammelband, Omnibus, Nonce - correction

[JOHN LANCASTER]

Sorry - I should have written in the first sentence: “The usage ‘nonce collection’ goes back …”


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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