"Folio 75" community bibliography

As discussed in another thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/329682#n7422994), I have been working on setting up a project to compile a new bibliography to cover the years after the publication of Folio 60.

The latest version can be seen in PDF format here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pNg9kCfaXcrjH2xl2bb9cfpBkgoYmbMs/view?usp=shari... For the curious, it was created in LaTeX, a document markup language commonly used to typeset papers in technical research fields.

I happily take suggestions about formatting or content (at the moment, the content is drawn straight from wcarter and folio_books' Complete List of Publications). The code is structured so that it is fairly straightforward to include illustrations. But I have so far refrained from doing that because I wanted to focus on getting the bibliography up and running and because I want to do things in a copyright-safe way if people are going to be interested in printing this, etc.

One place where people could help, if there's appetite, would be to flesh out the italic notes that appears under some entries. All that data could be put in the "Notes" column of the spreadsheets linked below. We are also looking for help populating the Production field with production information, and the price field with original list prices.

Each year has a separate spreadsheet on the following workbook:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14gAYQoYiJUgMPDPvywkOiQyz6ExQC7aZvwr-GLt3...

Also, if you do contribute, drop a note here so I can include you in the list of contributors!

If the project gets off the ground then I suppose it might also be good to have a couple of interesting introductory essays from the community.

Outstanding tasks that I am looking at include: configuring the index so that it references the number of the entry rather than the page number.

ranbarnes suggested adding information on typeface, printer, binder, etc., which all feature in Folio 60. This could be put into its own column in the spreadsheets. For technical reasons, it's a bit inconvenient to have more than 9 fields in the spreadsheet. Currently, there are 8 (6 if we won't have illustrations), so there is room to add a field for that kind of information if we want it.

---

If we happen to run out of columns we should be able to combine some. The main thing is that each field is an independent unit of data that can be manipulated separately. So, for example, it would be easy to produce a list of titles because there's a field containing only titles, but it would be difficult to automatically pull out a list of page counts because theose don't currently have their own field. Likewise, if we wanted to produce a version without the notes we could easily turn them off because they are in a separate field. Also, I can apply formatting to a whole field (e.g., the document is set to typeset the titles in capitals). So the question is: is there some value to having the printing/typesetting/etc information in its own field, or would it make more sense to include that information in the main description of the book?

In the wiki booklist, dimensions are in a mixture of inches and centimetres. The reason for this is that the inches measurements are taken from the FS website and refer to the book, where the centimetres measure the slipcase of books I own (this is explained in the wiki introduction). I believe the latter is more relevant for those with tight space wanting to house a potential purchase. For this potential publication, some standardisation is probably appropriate.

>3 wcarter: thanks, I saw that note and agree it would make sense to standardise. My hope is that if I get a good overall format for the document and set up the basic structure for the spreadsheets with the data, that will be the kind of thing that could be crowdsourced.

Is there use in adding prices? I know there are different prices for various parts of the world, but if we standardized to the GBP price it would seem appropriate, as the FS’s home is in the UK.

But you are running out of fields, so I’m not sure whether there are more useful things to devote a field to.

I suggest it because I find it a useful reference, and quite often I go to the full list of books, find it in there, and have to go through the prospectus to find the price.

>5 U_238: It seems prices are a bit controversial (see, e.g., the discussion here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/268394), not least of all because of how much they vary over time. But, on the other hand, if the price goes into its own field then it is a trivial matter to make a version with and without the price if having the price included offends some.

Regarding the number of available fields, I did a bit of housekeeping: I merged the dimensions into the main description and moved the limitation into the notes field. That gives us three spare columns to play with.

>3 wcarter:

FWIW I would support standardisation to centimetres.

Price: I would agree that initial price should be included, so many people have asked about it over the months. I don't think we should attempt to keep it updated. If anything this will highlight price creep as well. Similarly price in sterling makes most sense.

Dimensions: Folio 60 is in mm. The website is in imperial, and the dimensions are for the book only, but I support using SI, and taking the dimensions from the slipcase.

Printing / binding / typographical info:
example for Stranger in a Strange Land

Typeset at The Folio Society in Meridien with Altricham display
Printed on Abbey Wove paper at L.E.G.O. S.p.A., Vincenza, Italy,
and bound by them in cloth blocked with a design by the artist

>6 ubiquitousuk:
Could you add that to the spreadsheet so we can see what it comes out like, and how it needs to be formated in the cell?

>7 folio_books:
is there any mileage in asking FS for their numbering of books since 2006? I'm sure by now they aware of this project, if they are still actively thinking of their own bibliography, we should know now, and not make the effort

I see in the spreadsheet author, introducer, artist etc. formatted like this gets the name in capitals and included in the index
\contributor{Diarmaid}{MacCulloch}.

where it is not, e.g. Introduced by Neil MacGregor. it does not. I assume the formatting is first name last name. How does it cope with compound names - keep the whole thing in the last name?

I would vote for two new columns for price and book printing etc. This takes us to 8 including the two for illustrations and captions

>8 ranbarnes: is there any mileage in asking FS for their numbering of books since 2006? I'm sure by now they aware of this project, if they are still actively thinking of their own bibliography, we should know now, and not make the effort

I've emailed the question and await the answer. Don't hold your breath as they're very busy at the moment. Also, it's quite a cheeky question in many respects (commercial sensitivity to name but one) so I wouldn't necessarily expect a direct (and revealing) answer.

>8 ranbarnes: Okay, I added a price column and a production column.

Regarding price: if everything is in pounds we can just put a number there and I can get LaTeX to automatically format it with a pound symbol. If we think we might need a mix of currencies then the currency symbol would need to go into that cell. My suggestion is that we stick the the GB£ prices as originally published by the Folio Society if we are going to include that data.

Regarding the production information, we can pretty much type it verbatim into the cell (as I have done in this example). I have already updated the spreadsheet, and will update the example PDF a little later (have to dash to a meeting right now!) There are special symbols in LaTeX that have to be "escaped" (e.g., we have to type \& instead of &) but to keep things simple I'd say just put the data in that cell and I'll take care of making sure everything is formatted properly. Once the data is in there, it's a matter of figuring out how we want to typeset it. In the Folio 60 images folio_books posted, it seems like these details are in the middle of the description. Since we have it separate, I was thinking of typesetting it as a mini-paragraph after the main description but before the notes.

The \contributor{A}{B} command does two things. First, it prints the name as "A B". Second, it adds an index entry as "B, A". So it should be fairly safe to do something like "\contributor{Charles}{van Sandwyk}" or "\contributor{Charles van}{Sandwyk}", depending on whether it should be indexed under V or S. Some contributors have a single name (e.g., Plato) and then it would be \singlecontributor{Plato}. Ideally, all contributor names should be entered like this so that they show up in the index; I may have missed a couple.

\contributor is an example of a custom command I wrote to do a particular repetitive job (typesetting the name and adding to the index). We could make others if, for example, we always wanted something to be typeset in a particular way. Doing it this way has the advantage that if we decide we'd rather have the contributors' names in pink (for example), I can change one line and the whole document will update.

>9 folio_books: thanks!

Update: I have updated the compiled PDF, linked in >1 ubiquitousuk: to a new version including the first few entries with production information (thanks for adding this)! Take a look and see how the typesetting worked out.

>1 ubiquitousuk: Well done and thank you, this is all very impressive!

Yes, that looks good. Since Warwick's descriptions do include some of the production details, we might need to trim the duplication.

Is it going to be easy to generate spreadsheets for each year from 2007?

Great stuff!

>10 ubiquitousuk: regarding pricing, I agree with >8 ranbarnes: in that we should show release price only, but I see no harm in adding non-GBP release prices. All could be kept as a single entry in the same cell, e.g. "£125/$195 USD/$240 CAD/$290 AUD". GBP price may be a start, but I think if devotees from the US/Canada/Australia want to go through their release catalogs and add prices in their currencies it will only enhance the entries.

who is going to iron out typos? (see entries 41, 47, 69 which I noticed in passing, an apostrophe problem or accented letters?)

>12 ranbarnes: The other spreadsheets should be easy enough to make (it's just slightly laborious work). The structure needs to be the same as the other sheets and the main additional work, apart from copy-pasting the material into the right columns, is:

1) changing all contributors names to \contributor{forenames}{surname}

2) several characters have special meaning in latex and therefore have to be "escaped" (preceded by \). So & needs to be replaced with \&. Likewise, \$ instead of $. In a similar vein, to typeset £ we have to use \textsterling, and to typeset a backslash it's \backslash. This tidying-up can quickly be done with a find-and-replace once the data is in place.

3) LaTeX doesn't reliably like the vulgar fraction characters (e.g., ¼) used in dimensions in the wiki, so I have been replacing this with .25. One can typeset vulgar fractions in LaTeX, but it would be easier to do everything as a decimal for now and go back and fix it later. In fact, if we ultimately standardise around cm and mm then we probably don't need vulgar fractions anyway.

I can slowly work my way through the years doing this work (unless there's a desire to accelerate the process, in which case I welcome anyone to have a go at putting a year's spreadsheet together).

The main thing is to be sure we're happy with the structure of the sheet before creating more of them. Changing the fundamental structure of the sheets becomes more costly the more sheets need to be changed.

The other thing I realised is that it would probably make more sense to have all of the sheets in a single workbook. When the workbooks aren't being edited by anyone else, I will combine all of the sheets into a single workbook so that we have a single link to edit everything.

>13 elladan0891: Again, this is fine with me as long as we are consistent in the way the data is entered (and remembering the special format needed to input currency symbols described above).

>14 overthemoon:
It looks like an import problem from spreadsheet to LaTeX for certain characters, for example Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.
wiki:
Printed in 2 colours throughout. 18 integrated duotone illustrations by Sandra Rilova. Preface by the author. Translated by Paulette Møller. Pattern printed endpapers. Bound in yellow cloth blocked with a multi-colour design. Plain slipcase. 536pp. 9½x6¾in.
spreadsheet:
Printed in 2 colours throughout. 18 integrated duotone illustrations by \contributor{Sandra}{Rilova}. Preface by the author. Translated by \contributor{Paulette}{Møller}. Pattern printed endpapers. Bound in yellow cloth blocked with a multi-colour design. Plain slipcase. 536pp. 9.5x6.75in.

in the finished (proof of concept) pdf
Paulette MÃ ̧ller.

For real typos, this will be a community project - for example I spelt Vicenza as Vincenza in the production details for a couple of entries, now corrected.

>13 elladan0891:
Lets not make too much work though, a single price in sterling makes it easier and less likely to make errors with escaping currencies?

>16 ranbarnes: Those weird character typos are my fault! When I moved the dimensions into the "description" column I decided to streamline the process by opening the spreadsheet (as CSV) in a text editor with more powerful text manipulation functions. But somewhere between opening the sheet as a text file and then converting it back to Google docs, the encoding got messed up with the resulting MÃ ̧ller, etc. This happens when there are characters with diacritics.

More generally, I'm sure lots more errors will creep in and, indeed, having as many pairs of eyes on the finished product as possible will help fix them.

If we correct this to Møller in Google docs then LaTeX will render it fine. The reason it currently looks fine in the sheet but not in LaTeX is that I already corrected the sheet but didn't update the PDF!

>18 ubiquitousuk:
Ah, the joys of text editors. I use notepad++ myself for exactly this kind of problem!
At work I was getting endless problems with json formatting as well.

>8 ranbarnes: is there any mileage in asking FS for their numbering of books since 2006? I'm sure by now they aware of this project, if they are still actively thinking of their own bibliography, we should know now, and not make the effort

Sorry to leave this so late in the day but my email conversation has been ongoing and I'm still waiting for further information which I'm obviously not going to get before tomorrow. Anyway, I thought it better to give an update now and cross the t's tomorrow.

(Deep breath)

Plans are afoot. That the way it was put to me. They are looking to produce something for the 75th anniversary, Most likely to appear in a digital format as opposed to a printed book. I'm waiting to find out if they mean a supplement to Folio 60 or the whole shebang, Folio 75. They can't help with the numbering, but that's a moot point now, I imagine. BTW, as far as I can tell they weren't aware of this project before my email.

I'll be back if there's anything further to tell. I'm truly sorry if this isn't the news you wanted to hear. On the bright side, Folio are going to do it for us.

>17 ranbarnes: The extra work will be voluntary effort from non-UK members. The extra data might not be relevant to you as a Brit, but it's very useful to us in the domestic-currency-rip-off markets. Unfortunately, simply taking the sterling price and applying conversion rate at the time around the release will not give us local currency prices, as the colonist upcharge is always added and it fluctuates.

I'll be happy to enter USD prices from my catalogs, and I don't think I would have any more problems escaping the dollar character than you would escaping the sterling symbol :)

Basically, I don't see a good reason why we should not enter information that is useful to a very significant portion of devotees.

ETA: >20 folio_books: posted while I was writing this. I guess things could be put on hold since they appear to be doing it?

>20 folio_books: thanks for the update, your direct line to Folio head office never ceases to amaze. I feel a bit ambivalent about this news: Of course, it is far preferable to have an official resource (and an online one might be more useful in some respects). But it sounds like we might not get the nice volume to idly thumb through that we might have wished for. Still, it's not clear how attractive a community made version would be if it is inferior in information content and inconsistent in numbering with the official list that now seems certain to emerge. Let's wait and hear what else they have to say, but it seems like we could be about to get from Folio a close enough approximation of what we asked for.

>22 ubiquitousuk: But it sounds like we might not get the nice volume to idly thumb through that we might have wished for.

I'm absolutely with you on that. Folio 60 is my constant companion. It is a rare day when I don't consult it for one reason or another. I actually have two copies - one is in constant use beside me when I'm doing stuff on the computer, the other sits pristine on a bookshelf alongside the other Folio bibiographies, So much easier to look something up than online, digitally. The ideal, of course, is both, but it doesn't sound like that's going to happen.

But yes, let us see how Folio's plans progress. There are still a few questions to be answered.

>21 elladan0891:
Fair enough. If we do go ahead at some point, yes let's include the info. Given the news from folio_books, I suppose this is on hold for now.

>22 ubiquitousuk:
>23 folio_books:

Well at least we know we have a reasonable chance of producing something useful if Folio don't actually come through.

>25 ranbarnes:

That's the way I'm looking at it, too. They have been known to fail to come up with the goods in the past. This makes for an excellent safety net, if required.

>15 ubiquitousuk: re: fractions: if you do decide to go with typeset fractions, the xfrac package provides the \sfrac command, which works in both math and text mode, generates attractive fractions, and has been reliable for me. To be used like:

\sfrac{1}{2}

(The above produces the fraction for one half.)

>27 abysswalker:

Maybe the technical stuff can be moved to DM?

>28 folio_books: sure; apologies for any clutter. I will message ubiquitousuk directly if I have other suggestions.