Keywords
Citation
Turner, R. (2000), "Children’s Sequels (9th ed.)", New Library World, Vol. 101 No. 7, pp. 333-336. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.2000.101.7.333.4
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
In theory, a book of authors who have written series of books would be extremely useful to any librarian or teacher who is helping children with their reading selection. In practice, this ninth edition proves to be a very conservative and subjective selection. Before even opening this slim volume I jotted down the names of five popular authors of series of children’s books – only two were listed.
The brief preface (there is no introduction) demolishes any notion that this might be an essential reference tool to keep at the issue desk. For a start, there is the confession of “much of the material being transferred from the previous edition”. No indication is made anywhere of when the previous edition was.
This is followed by the arbitrary “Material published before 1980 has been largely left out, the exceptions being classics and standard or popular authors”. There is no definition of classics or standard … authors. Some sort of justification of the selection criteria would have been useful.
The strangest decision is to completely omit “Those series which are hugely prolific” and “ … those with many titles by the same authors”.
There is no clarification of the age range the books in this work cover. There are a lot of authors listed, so it may be of some use, but it is a very conservative selection and in no way can be seen as comprehensive. An example is that the Sparks History Series books are all listed, but the far more popular Horrible Histories are not.
Finally, if a librarian wants to have a list of other books published by an author, we do have those hardly unknown devices of catalogues and access to bibliographic databases in print, CD‐ROM and Internet format. After reading this very personal list (and list is all it is, there are no abstracts or appraisals) one is left with the ringing question of “Why bother?” Save your £20.