Talk:Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management

Querying an assertion in the present text
I would question "selling 60,000 copies in its first year", as the first year was 1861, and I have an 1863 copy with '50th Thousand' on the title page (and have a photo of this).Bruffik (talk) 00:48, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
 * The claim is longstanding (2001, 2014) and reliably sourced. Of course it could be mistaken, but so could your copy: the printer might have been careless (it often happened), and the book may have been plagiarized, which often happened in that period also. Chiswick Chap (talk) 06:31, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Book title and editions
Two queries: on the evidence of the correctly-captioned first edition cover the book is Beeton's Book of Household Management, edited by Mrs. Isabella Beeton, rather than Mrs. Beeton's ....; or from the 1st page (mirroring the title page) The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Isabella Beeton. Of course the present article name could reasonably be said to satisfy WP:COMMONNAME, but should not the article begin by referring to the real title, whichever meets bibliographical conventions? If the book's name changed in later editions, as stated in the lead, shouldn't that also be in the article per WP:MOSLEAD, and set out in the long list of editions.


 * Thanks. We've tried to be reasonably "correct" but the variation of names does make this difficult. Let's think whether a change is needed. I've added a mention that the "Beeton's ... " was only brief, which should explain why it was not the name by which the book was commonly known. That says to me that we have the title about right.

It is clear from the article that there were extensive changes to and expansion of the book's text over the years, but I wonder whether every entry on the Editions list is really a new edition, or also includes reprints with no change to the book itself, just a different date. To me a new edition either has some changes/additions to the text or is from a different publisher. Some clarification of this and the names used in the publication in the otherwise rather bare list would improve it a lot, I think. Davidships (talk) 20:11, 26 February 2019 (UTC)


 * The editions really did grow steadily, and there were many different texts with increasing page counts over the years. Whether it's appropriate for us to attempt a full analysis is a moot point. It may well be that a bibliophile academic has done such a thing. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:55, 26 February 2019 (UTC)