User talk:Skot65

McSweeney's

Hi, Skot- Amazon.com is a useful tool for determining publication order, because they provide generally reliable issue dates. Even if the precise day as shown is not exactly correct, it's still accurate as to the relative order. So the early books are:

1. Neal Pollack, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (1 September 2000)
2. Lawrence Krauser, Lemon (15 January 2001)
3. Jonathan Lethem, This Shape We're In (5 February 2001)
4. Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist's Mate (1 June 2001)
5. David Byrne, The New Sins (1 August 2001)
6. Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant (1 October 2001)
7. Ben Greenman, Superbad (November 2001)
8. Fonseca & Carolino, English as She is Spoke (Collins Library No. 1) (April 2002)
9. Stephen Dixon, I. (June 2002)
10. Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity (September 2002)
11. Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories (November 2002)
12. Nick Hornby, Songbook (December 2002)
13. Geoffrey Pyke, To Ruhleben—And Back (Collins Library No. 2) (15 April 2003)
14. Marcel Dzama, The Berlin Years (10 June 2003)

And then Eggers' Sacrament sometime in 2003, and Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies by Lucy Thomas (Eggers) in September 2003, and Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down in November 2003...and after that you're on your own. Some other McSweeney's titles are listed in the McSweeney's article.

RE: Dale Peck in McSwy's 1--He is included among the Contributors bios on page 140: "Dale Peck writes books and wears leather pants."--ShelfSkewed [Talk] 05:30, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

The New Sins was republished recently, as was Dzama's The Berlin Years. And I got the titles for the above list from my own shelves.

As for ISBNs--International Standard Book Number--each ISBN-10 (used from the late 1960s through 2006) is made up of ten digits in four parts--take, as an example, the ISBN for Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity: 0-9703355-5-5. The first digit is a language code (0 or 1 for English). The second part is the publisher code—every participating country has a company or an agency that assigns these codes; in the U.S. it's R.R. Bowker—and a publisher may have and use more than one of these. After 9703355, McSweeney's Books was assigned 932416, which they're still using. The third part is the book number assigned by the publisher. The tenth and final digit is a check digit or checksum, which is used to verify that the rest of the ISBN is valid (multiply each of the first 9 digits by its place order, add the products, divide the sum by eleven, and the remainder should be the checksum digit). ISBN-13 (the new standard as of January 1, 2007) is the same as the ISBN with 978 prefixed to it, and a different checksum calculation & digit. For way more than you need to know about ISBNs, see isbn.org. ASIN is Amazon Standard Identification Number. See that article for details. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 20:09, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

hey shelfskewed- further on isbn's? i've nearly finished compileing the list of mscweeney's publications but there are a few curiousities. i have isbn's for everything and when i order them by isbn the berlin years comes up first, then McSweeney's Books Sampler No. 1 , and then the list above more or less. i figured isbn's would be chronological based upon production. i guess the release date may be in a different order but the # for the berlin years predates it's release by 3 years. any ideas? --Skot65 02:32, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm a little confused, because the McSweeney's Books Sampler didn't have an ISBN. It was a promo item, not a regularly published book, and promo items sometimes have a unique ISBN, but usually not--in this case, not. Sometimes, though, booksellers will make up a non-official ISBN for inventory control purposes. Perhaps this is what you have?

As for the Dzama, the ISBN-10 of the original edition was 0-9719047-9-0, which would put it right after the Pyke book (0-9719047-8-2), where it belongs. The 2006 version has number 1-932416-74-9, which might cause some confusion.

It helps to remember that the publisher code is assigned by an outside agency, and they aren't necessarily assigned in any particular order, except that publishers that expect to publish very few books are given longer publisher codes (because they need fewer digits for the book codes, the third part of the ISBN) and prolific publishers are given very short codes (Penguin is 14, HarperCollins is 06) which leaves them six digits for the book codes. (And to add a correction to my earlier post: Obviously McSwy's was assigned publisher code 9719047 after 9703355 and before 932416.) The book codes are the part that the publisher controls, and for McSwy's, these generally go chronologically & numerically together, but there are exceptions. I believe You Shall Know Our Velocity has a lower number than it "should" have according to publication date, probably because it was assigned a number and then publication was delayed for some reason.

I know that for quick searching purposes, it's easier to run all the number together. But to see the patterns in how the numbers are assigned, you need to know where the hyphens go. And you need to be careful about same-titled publications (the Dzama or the Byrne or the first Collins Library title, which also has a paperback reprint edition) with different ISBNs --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 03:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)