Hymn added in later edition

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Haruo's picture

I have been working on the data for Christian Worship: A Hymnal, the 1941 hymnal jointly produced by and for the Disciples of Christ and the Northern Baptist Convention. I have used my copy of what I believe to be the first edition (originally my Aunt Margie's copy, which she appears to have received "Compliments of the American Baptist Publication Society" in May, 1942), with a Judson Press (i.e. Baptist) imprint, as my authority for changes to, and augmentation of, the DNAH data.

Anyhow, I just borrowed, from the King County Library System, their copy of this hymnal, which is also a Judson Press issue (the Disciples' versions carry the imprint "Bethany Press"), according to the back of the title page, the eighteenth printing, 1964. I borrowed it to see whether the misspelling of the tune name at hymn #97 had been corrected. It had been. I don't see any other substantive differences... except that an additional hymn has been inserted after #650, the SEVENFOLD AMEN which had been the last piece preceding the indexes. Hymn #651 is the National Anthem.

It seems to me ridiculous to create a whole new hymnal for each edition of a denominational hymnal, if over the course of eighteen printings only two changes have been made, so I utilized the NOTES field to draw attention to these.

However, I do not know at what point between 1941 and 1964 these emendations were introduced, so if any of you out there have other printings at hand, please let me know. Meanwhile, I will contact Judson Press and see if they can shed any light on this extremely important question.


Comments

I used to be a used book dealer in Alabama. I can tell you that I certainly consider any new edition to be a separate book. Sometimes, new printings also had changes made. In such cases, I believe they should have been designated a new edition but sometimes they just aren't for whatever reason. (The Sacred Harp has numerous such examples). Therefore, if any changes at all were made from edition to the next or from one printing to the next, I think it should be a separate entry.

In theory I completely agree with you. In practice, there are nowhere near enough Hymnary editors out there to do the job. After all, to make it worth the doing, someone has to go through the variant edition item by item and check each factoid. Meanwhile dozens of worthy hymnals sit completely (or nearly so) unentered in the database. Even if we were all paid to do this 40 hours a week, it would take a long, long time. So if I don't have time to do a proper job of such an edition, I'll continue to try to make use of the Notes features, both for the hymnal and for the instances altered.