Why is the place of publication so important in bibliographies?

Factual Questions
1

When I was a child, I was always taught to put the place of publication in the bibliographies I would do for school papers. Typically, this would be New York, but you’d occasionally see something published in Boston, London, or maybe even something more exotic like Melbourne, Australia. This continued into college.

Why is this so important? When I’m looking for books, the search values that seem to matter most are the author and title. I rarely, if ever, really care about the identity of the publisher (e.g. Random House) or the place of publication (e.g. New York, London, or San Francisco).

Was knowing where the hell Random House published from considered important at some point in the past? Did academics travel (or send their grad students to travel for them) around the world to seek out books that their students and other professors had cited?

E.g.:

1823, Tokyo
Grad Student: “Hello, I’m here on behalf of Professor George Jones of Harvard University. One of his students cited the book “Konnichi-wa o-nii-san” by M. Tochiro, published in Tokyo by Cherry Blossom Press in 1796 as justification for the statement that there are 3,000 known species of insects. We need to verify the citation. Can you tell me where the offices of Cherry Blossom Press are? We want to order a copy.”
Local: “Book publisher close down. Gone. Owner die in war. Want buy pretty necklace?”
Grad Student: "grr… I have a few days to try used bookstores and antiques shops here. Then I have to catch the S. S. Johnson to Wellington to look for “An Introduction to Wangs” by My Dick Press.

2

I’m just guessing here, but I suspect it’s because the content of a book can vary between places of publishing (especially if it’s released there at a much later date than the original).

If the professor wants to verify something you said and their copy of a book you cited says something different (or in a different place) than what you quoted or referenced in your paper, they need to know if the disparity is the result of sloppy scholarship, or because the publisher changed the text between your copy and the professors copy.

3

The has annoyed the heck out of me for decades. But actually, the question is even better than the OP phrases it, because by my memory, the year and place of publication are important, but NOT the name of the publisher. What good is it to know that it was published in a certain city, if I don’t know which of the thousands of publishers there had his hand in it?

4

How often did this happen with respect to scholarly or halfway-scholarly works with respect to substantive information? I can see a book being published in New York and London with localized spellings of words (e.g. color/colour) and maybe vocabulary changes (e.g. truck/lorry), but would you get cases where M. Williamson’s breakthrough Study of Butterfly Wing Mechanics came out in Boston with the text of the original manuscript but the Canadian edition published in Toronto had extra Canadian Content ghostwritten by B. Robinson that claimed that Nova Scotian butterflies are fastest and also removed pages 5 to 7 to downplay the contributions of E. Jones at Cornell because he was considered a traitor to Canada?

5

I can think of two reasons:

  • the place of publication offers additional context. Cherry Blossom Press in Tokyo is a Japanese publisher. With Cherry Blossom Press I don’t even know in which country’s publisher directory to look them up.

  • the place of publication disambiguates publishers of the same name. I guess there are a lot of small publishers with common or generic names that can use disambiguation. Another case: After the establishment of two German states a lot of publishers in East Germany were expropriated and the owners started anew in West Germany under their established name, so quite a few publishers existed as a West German private business and an East German state-owned business, to be distinguished by the place of publication.

6

It’s an artifact of the pre-Google age.

7

I was told by a very patient university librarian that it often mattered what “culture” the book came from when it came to interpreting the material. Knowing the material was published in NYC rather than Chicago or London told the careful scholar of the age useful things.

8

My bad. I wentto look up some examples, and they all do give the name of the publisher. I don’t know why I had thought the publisher’s name is missing. Is it possible that in the 1960’s it was common to omit the publisher’s name, but now the rules are different?

9

No, the publisher name was always needed, but in the era of local telephone books and long-distance calls, it was useful to know which “Liberty Press” was being discussed and where to find them. I did my bibliographies in the era when you had to type Englewood Cliffs, N.J. for everything that came from Prentice-Hall. It always seemed a little silly for the University of Chicago Press and the like.

Side note: In 1994, when you still called Directory Assistance, I named my little business Chicago [whatever]. I figured that if a potential client couldn’t figure out how to contact me from that clue, I wasn’t going to be very happy working with them.

10

As a book collector, the place of publication is one of the clues to whether the book is or is not a first edition. First edition state is generally an important factor in the value of a book. Perhaps a book was published as a first edition in Chicago with an imprint of 500 volumes. It sold well and a New York publisher published it 6 months later in an edition of 5,000. Chicago is the actual first edition and the closest state to what the author actually intended. If the author signed the Chicago book - even better. Between the Chicago printing and the New York printing many changes may have been made to the book - corrections, additions, subtractions - any number of changes may have taken place.

I don’t generally buy my books based solely on their resale value but it is a factor in the “hunt” - finding a particular book, in a particular state, signed by the author, in good to excellent condition, at a good price - there is just nothing like it to the collector :slight_smile:

11

No need to shout, dude.

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If you are working online and not from a physical copy of a book, this can be a real pain to ascertain, as neither effin’ Google books nor Amazon give place of publication in their bibliographic listings. You can probably find out from the Library of Congress catalog, or some other library catalog, but then it may be hard to tell whether the edition listed there is the same one that you might be seeing on Google. Also, I have found, you often can’t tell from a publishing company’s web site where they are located (and where it will say one of their books was published from on the copyright page). Sometimes big publishers issue books from more than one location, but even if they always use use the same one, there is often no indication on their web site where it is. It may or may not be the same city where their head office is located, but often it can be difficult to discover even that.

Even when you can view the title page and copyright information page of the book itself, sometimes multiple places of publication are listed. I am looking at book now that comes from Academic Press. On the title page, after the publisher name it says “London, New York, Paris, San Diego, San Francisco, São Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto”. The copyright page gives addresses in both London and New York. I am going to list its place of publication as London, as that is listed first, but that is at least partially a guess as to which is right. On balance the evidence suggests that this particular copy was issued from London, but another copy of the same book might well have been issued from New York, and I am pretty sure I have seen ones seemingly issued only from San Diego (and there are probably books issued from the other locations listed too).

Not only is place of publication information usually useless, as the OP implies (though I can think of exceptions), it can be frustratingly difficult to obtain. :mad:

12

The reason for giving place of publication and name of publisher is simply so that people can identify the publication. In older catalogues they only mentioned the place but not the publishers name, which is totally useless or with the words of a friend of mine “Do they think books just happen without any effort from a publisher?”.

13

You’re assuming that the first step for anyone wanting to locate a copy of the book would be to contact the publisher. But that wasn’t self-evident at all. The name of the publisher is not much use if that publisher has since ceased to exist. The would-be reader, especially one writing from a distance, might well have had more luck contacting one of the larger booksellers in that particular city. That’s the sort of service major booksellers prided themselves on providing. And this applied even more strongly if the book was long out-of-print. Knowing that a particular edition had been published in New York rather than London gave you a major headstart, if you’re next step was connecting antiquarian booksellers, given that a dealer in New York would be significantly more likely to have it in stock than one in London.

But there was a further reason. The would-be reader might prefer to seek a copy in a library. But for a book with, say, British and American editions, a British library would usually have just the British edition and an American library, the American one. This might not matter much and the reader could always begin by using whichever library they had easiest access. But a careful researcher would always want to be aware if the citation they were checking referred to the other edition. It also ought to be remembered that while the publisher’s name was usually irrelevant for the purposes of searching a library catalogue, the place of publication was a particularly useful clue as to which libraries might hold a copy of that book. That was not unimportant in the days when only the most important libraries printed their catalogues and when consulting those catalogues itself required a trip to a library.

[QUOTE=njtt]
If you are working online and not from a physical copy of a book, this can be a real pain to ascertain, as neither effin’ Google books nor Amazon give place of publication in their bibliographic listings.
[/QUOTE]

Absolutely. While it’s a bit churlish not to be thankful that so much is now available online, there seems to be a complete lack of awareness that not all editions are equal and that any serious researcher doesn’t just want whichever one that search turns up at random. It’s as if the New Bibliography never happened.

14

Bah!!! These things don’t matter in our new, improved internet age. Just tell me how many “likes” a book has on Facebook. What more could one possibly need to know?

If my Facebook “friend” of a “friend” of a “friend”, Suzi Rottencrotch “likes” it, that’s good enough for me!

If I somehow need more context than that, I’ll just ask Yahoo Answers. Jeez… some of you guys are like… dinosaurs and stuff.

15

I long ago stopped citing the place of publication. If a reader wants to locate it, the author, title, date, edition, and conceivably the publisher are relevant but certainly not the place of publication. In fact, what the publisher names are all the places they have offices, which is not the place of publication, if that even has a meaning these days.

16

One, yes, in the past knowing which city to contact to purchase a book was invaluable to a researcher in a world without massive, comprehensive research libraries in order to get a copy. It also helps a library purchase a book.

But, perhaps even more importantly, as I tell my students in the research class I teach, it enables a good researcher to know if a book is worth getting or looking at. It helps us assess the relative value of a book. When you are doing research in the secondary literature, you want the best sources on the topic you can get. You start by looking at who the author is, and what their area of expertise is. Someone who is a renowned scholar in US Civil War studies is likely not to be the best source for information of the evolution of female dress, 1950-1990. (Not LIKELY- that doesn’t mean they aren’t a good source, it is just following the truth that professional scholarship requires years of study in a specific area to know the field, maybe they have done all that research in that completely unrelated field, possible, but not likely). Therefore, knowing the author’s name is important. The title is also important: through the use of citation indices you can see how often other scholars are referencing the work, giving a sense as to how influential the work might be in its field. Who the publisher is, is also vital. If you are researching the Southern colonies in Colonial America, the premier publisher in that field is the UNC Press (who publishes all of the "Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture- OIEAHC for short- which is based in Williamsburg, VA ,a nd is part of William and Mary.) So, if you see it is UNC press, that means the book came from the most prestigious and rigorously peer-reviewed press in its field. In other words, it is about as good and current thinking on its subject as you can get.

But let’s say you don’t know who the publisher is, and don’t want to waste precious minutes of time researching online, you need to eliminate or accept the book ASAP (you only have so much funding to finance your time in the libraries / archives- you don’t waste your precious time). So, a city tells the researcher if the book was published in a well-known publishing center. If the publisher is in NYC, it is likely to be done by a larger firm that can be more discriminating. If you see Cambridge, MA- it is almost certainly an imprint (think brand, like Chevy- GM is the manufacturer, but Chevy is the name it sells under) of the Harvard University Press. If it is from Lima, OH, which does not have any major publishers, then I know that it is likely to be a vanity press; someone just paid to have someone publish their book, and I can ignore it. This situation comes up in my own research all the time- I find a book that seems to be problematic for my thesis, but has an unknown publisher in some obscure city. I pass over that book, in the immediate short term, and only when I am in the hotel, back at home, I do a quick search to see if the publisher is worthwhile. Pretty much w/o fail if the publisher is from some obscure city it is a book from a vanity press that I can ignore.

I will grant for most people in the world, knowing the place of publication is kinda pointless, but for the academic it is another valuable tool in our research kit.

So, that’s why!

17

Yes, actually.

:slight_smile: Also, a good and funny hypothetical.