Talk:Ace Books

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Article Milestones Date Process Result May 11, 2006 Peer review Reviewed September 4, 2006 Featured article candidate Promoted Current Status: Featured article

• /Archive 1: June 2004 – May 2005.

Contents 1 Needs pruning 2 Capitalization 3 Rings copyright 4 FA nomination? 5 references "not seen"?

[edit] Needs pruning

This is intermittently fascinating, but it needs pruning. Consider for example this chunk:

A dos-à-dos book has the two titles bound upside-down with respect to one another, so that there are two front covers and the two texts meet in the middle (perhaps with some advertising pages in between). This format has been generally regarded as an innovation of Ace's; for example, James Corrick (the author of a reference work on Ace Doubles) quotes the October 18, 1952 issue of Publisher's Weekly as noting that although previous books had been published dos-à-dos, Ace was the first to put different authors in the same volume in this format.^[1] The format itself was certainly not Ace's invention—there had long been devotional books bound dos-à-dos — but in fact there had also been earlier examples of books by different authors bound in this way. For example, Irvin S. Cobb's Oh! Well! You Know How Women Are! bound dos-à-dos with Mary Roberts Rinehart's Isn't That Just Like A Man!, was published by George Doran in 1920.^[2] However, Ace published hundreds of titles bound in this way over the next twenty years, and became much the best known publishers of the format.

1. ^ Corrick, James A. (1989). Double Your Pleasure: the ACE SF Double. New York: Gryphon Books, 6. ISBN 0-936071-13-3. 

• ^ Copy description located in second-hand bookstore Robert Wright Books. Retrieved on May 9, 2007.

[Sorry about the odd formatting there: it's what happens when you try to precede "<references />" with a colon.]

This sends the reader to dos-à-dos, which actually gives the reader no additional encyclopedic information. (It does provide minor etymological information, which was hilariously wrong till I fixed it just now: look at this goofy edit, look at the edit summary, and consider that this silliness lasted almost two months.) Then well-documented misinformation about the significance of Ace gets us into a miniature essay about dos-à-dos binding that's pretty tangential to Ace, though this is indeed rescued at the end.

I suggest instead that somebody better informed about bibliographic matters than I am creates Dos-à-dos binding, sticks what's necessary there, and then writes in this article something like:

Although dos-à-dos binding (back-to-back binding with two front covers) had long predated its use by Ace, Ace greatly increased its salience in US mass culture, to the point where it was thought of as an Ace innovation.

. . . adding a brief note with the Publisher's Weekly misinformation, stating that Garrick relates this on page six.

A lot shorter! -- Hoary 09:34, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed suggestion -- very helpful. I've created dos-à-dos binding as you suggest, and moved some of the material there; I left a bit more in this article than you suggested. Let me know whether you think this is enough pruning. I'd also be interested to hear any other suggestions on the rest of the article -- is there other pruning that could take place? Thanks -- Mike Christie 14:08, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization

1. Given a choice, I usually plump for lowercase, but I'm surprised by the use of "sf" for "science fiction". As this is (I believe!) pronounced /esef/ rather than /sf/, wouldn't "SF" be better? -- Hoary 23:36, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

You're right about the pronunciation, but this is quite a common form in my experience -- for example, it's the preferred usage in the Nicholls/Clute "Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction", which is the most widely respected encyclopaedia. I prefer "sf" myself, though on other pages I've seen other forms used. Mike Christie 00:31, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah, but see what an E-E dictionary says. I think you'll find that it will suggest "SF" (perhaps instead/also "S.F." if US). An encyclopaedia of SF might prefer "sf" as thousands of instances of "SF" would become visually tiresome. Note that the WP article on Science fiction systematically uses "SF" (though it does mention "sf"). -- Hoary 04:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

2. I've changed Too Hot For Hell (my emphasis) to Too Hot for Hell. It's odd to capitalize prepositions (unless you're running a traditional US newspaper); see any style guide about this. A lot more such, er, decapitalization is needed. -- Hoary 23:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I've fixed two or three; let me know or fix anything else you see. I think the title lists are probably infested with this mistake too; I'll get to those eventually. Mike Christie 00:31, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rings copyright

We read:

In 1965 Wollheim discovered a copyright loophole in the American edition of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Houghton Mifflin edition had been bound using pages printed in the United Kingdom for the George Allen & Unwin edition. This placed them outside of US copyright law as it stood at the time.

My underlining. But whatever them refers to, either the meaning of the whole remains obscure or my brain isn't firing on all cylinders today. Could you elaborate a little? -- Hoary 04:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

This text predates my involvement in the article, but I'm pretty sure the referent is intended to be "pages" -- no doubt the wording could be clarified. Can't stop to fix it now, but will have a crack at it if you don't. Mike Christie 11:12, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I've had a go at rewording it. Mike Christie 17:04, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] FA nomination?

What would it take for this article to be ready to go to a featured article nomination? I've done a fair amount of work on it and would like to try to push it to the next level; I'd be interested in any criticisms or suggestions for improvement. Mike Christie 17:04, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] references "not seen"?

"The following references have not been seen". Seen by who? How do you know that no one who has worked on this article has seen any of those references?? The usual convention is to put unused and/or uncited reference works into a Further reading section. Kaldari 01:12, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I was the one who introduced them to the article, and I haven't ever seen copies; they weren't consulted in the course of making the article. However, I agree that my phrasing was poor; it implies an individual article author, which wasn't what I meant. What I was trying to indicate was that I only had secondary sources to vouch for the existence/usefulness of the references. I'm happy with the way your last edit leaves it. Mike Christie (talk) 01:23, 30 August 2006 (UTC)