Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I've a problem. Psmith is the central character of the Psmith/Mike stories, but the first book Mike at Wrykyn does not include Psmith. Add to it, Mike is a very minor character in the last of the series, Leave It to Psmith. Should I call the series "Mike/Psmith"?

The series consists of:
1. Mike at Wrykyn
2. Enter Psmith or Mike and Psmith
1-2. Mike
3. Psmith in the City
4. Psmith, Journalist
5. Leave It to Psmith

If Mike was never slit up and published separately, it would be easy to just call the series "Psmith", but he isn't in Mike at Wrykyn at all.

It clearly needs a series identifier defined, I just want to make sure I use one that makes sense to everyone.

The omnibus editions are called "Psmith Omnibus" so that would make a lot of sense. I could have a separate "Mike" series that consists of #1-#4 and a Psmith series that consists of #2-#5, but that seems a little odd.

While I'm talking about this series, there's another issue.

Psmith is known primarily by his last name. This is handy as his first name changes in the last of the books.

He starts out being named Rupert Psmith, then in the last book becomes Ronald Eustace Psmith.

While there's a standard for aliases, I don't know of a standard for legitimately different names for the same character. I'm thinking of just listing him as "Psmith".

I am now thinking of two series, one Wrykyn, and the other Psmith. There are a lot of other Wrykyn stories, so this seems to fit. Mike, then, becomes a cross-over character.

Personally since having done some research, there does not seem to be any agreement between P G Wodehouse societies /clubs and other book websites regarding series information we should not be adding "made up" series info. I can understand from a "cleanness" prespective why you would want to do it but I don't agree but then I m not a P G Wodehouse fan

I agree with Paula. You shouldn't decide series information. It should come from the books, the author's website or perhaps the publisher.

Otherwise everyone could just decide to redo your information, because they didn't agree with it! Personal opinion is no substitute for facts.

I am OCD about my books also, therefore I only want real information on Goodreads.

I was going to go with publication dates. I did not know there was disagreement with regards to the order of novels. I knew that some of the short stories in some of the collections didn't have a clearly established order within the series, but when it comes to one story in a set of eight or ten other (non-series) stories, I was just going to ignore it.

The Psmith stories, in particular, seem to have an established series order to them. So far that is the only series I've added series information to, as I was comfortable with it. (Wodehouse himself penned introductions to omnibus volumes.)

I'll do some more research in the matter as well. For series without a recognized, clean order, I'll indicate the series without an order number (as I've seen recommended by others for confusing series).

Thanks for the reminder about being careful about the series name. I'll make sure I use established series names, as found (for instance) as part of omnibus titles. Instead of a Wrykyn series, this means it may be a "School stories" series, as there are "School" omnibuses. (I'll check to see how the fan sites group them.)

When there is confusion about the series order, I'll document it in the description with the differing possibilities. His books tend to overlap in terms of their series. Mike (which contains Psmith #1) is also a School story, and Psmith #4 is part of his Blandings Castle Saga. As it is established that Goodreads allows books to belong to multiple series, if some of the issue is with regards to which single series a book should fall in, that doesn't seem like an issue here.

I didn't even think to look at fan sites, though. (Thank you for that reminder!) I looked at Wikipedia and some of the primary sources Wikipedia mentioned, plus some more literary sites. Ah, well, I'm still getting used to some of this stuff. (I think I've been a user of the site less than two weeks, still.)

I feel strongly that as a reader it should be easy to see that a single book is part of a series. Ideally, you want to easily know where it is in the series -- however if there is confusion it makes more sense to list it in the description than in the title.

Personally, there's nothing I hate more than to find an interesting book and be unable to easily determine the first book in the series.

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

Sandra, these books are in the public domain. Unfortunately this means that anyone and their uncle can legally publish them. Some publishers grossly confuse the name. (G. P. Wodehouse) I trust the publishers least of all. Shoot, with 15 minutes of my time, I could be an ebook publisher for his books.

I'm a little OCD about my books, too. It's why I posted this thread to begin with. :) I appreciate your feedback.

At this point, for this author, it appears the best source of information is the fan sites. They care a lot more about the information than many of the publishers, and due to the age of the material, the author himself does not have a website.

Also, as the fans are the ones that would be most likely to say I've done it wrong, I nip that issue in the bud by taking their opinion in to account early on. This will be further mitigated by mentioning both possible orders when there is confusion.

Steven, you don't need to limit the series name to just one. If the book overlaps two series, both can be mentioned in ( ). There are examples of this in the librarian manual - title. I know you've read it, but it doesn't hurt to refresh, especially as you've been doing, thinking about a lot of different aspects of Goodreads in a short time.