A Series Of Rhetorical Questions

[labellementeuse]

Having written the bulk of my research essay, I'm wasting time going through and fixing up my citations (in order not to go through and make the structural changes I suspect I have to make to the second half, plus of course the introduction and conclusion.) I usually like writing citations, they're mechanical and sometimes interesting. But children's fiction from 1930 turns out to be a NIGHTMARE to cite. I have 4 editions of Peter Duck on the page, one by Jonathan Cape, one by Puffin, two by Red Fox, plus apparently Red Fox is a Random House imprint (I think?) so that's five different publishers, four editions, and I just can't decide whether to cite it as a republished book or a book with multiple editions. I think republished because I want to include both first pub date and the pub date of this edition, but I'm pretty sure that since this is actually a different edition I should point that out (after all, Hugh Brogan dedicated some probably truly distressing amount of time going through and cataloguing all the differences between the editions, which probably means that that's important... or, you know, he had a lot of time on his hands. I mean, seriously?) SIGH. I guess it'll be Frankencitation.

I shouldn't mock Hugh Brogan really, though, since my copy of Swallows and Amazons claimed that it was first published in 1932 and my copy of Peter Duck reckons it was first published in 1930. So obviously this kind of thing isn't as easy as it looks!

Comments

[bens_dad]

Ugh. My sympathies.

My father's Ransome books are Jonathan Cape hardbacks from the late forties. JC didn't do paperbacks, so my paperbacks from the early eighties are Puffin.
Somewhere around 1990 Jonathan Cape became part of Random House, who did have a Children's divison, Red Fox, which prints paperbacks, so the Ransome paperbacks moved back to the same publisher as the hardbacks. Thus there are really only two publishers, although one has three names.

Could it be something like Swallow and Amazons was first published in NZ in 1932, whilst Peter Duck was first published in the UK in 1932 ?

[bens_dad]

Sorry, my Puffins are mid seventies not early eighties
(not sure whether I forgot when I was born or my mental arithmetic went wrong).