I am prepping myself for work on this monster of a book, Miscellaneous Works by Jonathan Swift, published in 1720. I picked it off of the cart because it was a tiny single volume and those usually go pretty fast. Well, I was completely wrong-- this book may take me the better half of the workday to catalog. Not only is the book in two parts-- one containing A tale of a tub (first time using the object tag! yes!) and the other containing "miscellanies in prose and verse" (read: complications in defining the dominant narrative form, not to mention the "contains" subfield)--, there is also an advertisement from the bookseller, an errata, a table of contents, a "catalogue of treatises" (?), a second title page for Tub, a dedication, a To the reader, an "epistle dedicatory" to a "Prince Posterity," a preface, an introduction, many "digressions" and "dissertations" interspersed throughout Tub (including my favorite, "A digression, in praise of digressions." Finally! My habit of procrastinating is validated!), a third title page, another advertisement, a fourth title page, another To the reader, another preface, something labeled "a table, or index, or key" (hey, thanks for being specific...not), an "abstract" (possibly part of the table-- I'll look closely once I get to it), a fifth title page, and tons of marginalia, all in different mediums, including a really nice doodle of a hand.
Well, it will clearly be a long afternoon (although secretly, I am really looking forward to cataloging this book). Richard and I met with Lynn in the morning to further discuss the uses of OCLC and 700/710 fields, or two current stumbling blocks. Then I fixed some tricky 700/710 fields that I had overlooked before while Richard worked on cataloging new books. And now I am ready to work on this book... after I eat lunch and finish with this Anna
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