Talk:List of Ace titles in numeric series

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Comments

The description of the Numbered series says it is "Alphabetical" then fails to list them alphabetically when it comes to the Ace Doubles, where one of the titles impels its place in the number sequence - since this is a crucial attribute of the numbering, it seems silly to fail to list them the right way. I will change a couple, but really the entire set needs changing just to show the elegance of the idea. [Ace left gaps in the sequence and inserted reprints of books with the number slightly increased.. there did come a point when they ran out of space, and indeed I know of one instance when they got confused on which title was being used for the numbering, so the reprint appears well out of sequence]. Occasionally, the numbering looks bizarre but is completely correct - Alexei Panshin's Masque World is 02320 [ie, among the A's] even when it is clearly an M - except that the book SHOULD BE "Anthony Villiers: Masque World" (the name of the hero) which was presumably the title used when the book was about to be published, which indeed does put it in the A's.

In addition, Ace later used ISBNs which appear to make the book a part of the numbered sequence, but they really aren't (eg, all the first books "000--"). The "genuine" number sequence probably began to fail in the late 70s.

Also note there are a number of "fake" numbers - at the time of the transition from lettering to numbering, Ace began to list certain books as being numbered, but they were actually only renaming (not printing or reprinting) their existing stock of lettered editions. It is not exactly clear how many this applied to, but it seems to have applied mainly to 1968 or 1969 titles. {Eg, 22811 is Van Vogt's "The Far-Out Worlds of A E Van Vogt" which had one lettered printing before its expansion as The Worlds Of A E Van Vogt (as 22812), but there was no actual edition with 22811 on the cover at the time; some were later reissued with the number blocked out and the new number inserted)

There is occasional confusion on the dating of the books -- the numbering began in 1969 and all dates should be later than that, but occasionally the "original" date of publication for the book has crept in -- there should be consistency on when this actual EDITION of the book was published. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.105.47.250 (talk) 15:01, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

All good points. I hope you can continue to clean the article up; I don't have the time for this one at the moment but I am glad to see it being worked on. Mike Christie (talk) 00:06, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]