Your Humble Reader came across a constantly updated page showing the most recent record entered into Worldcat. It’s kind of hypnotic, and fascinating. When I was watching this morning, I saw a dozen or more that appeared to have their fields all asquint.
Title: Samuel Patterson 1756 Londonderry.
Author: New Hampshire.
Title: Timothy Johnson 1756 Greenland.
Author: New Hampshire.
Title: William Hobbs 1756 Amherst.
Author: New Hampshire.
On closer look, they all have the publisher listed as ‘Rumford printing co.’, and are published in the late 1930s. (They are all also Books in the English language, and are contributed to the database by the Godfrey Memorial Library. The Godfrey has a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and is generally set up to help people do genealogy work. However, since they appear to have a very nice selection of early-ish American resources available to library members, and you, too, can be a member for only $35, this would be astonishingly useful and cheap for anyone doing work in, say, 19th C. Base Ball.)
I emailed the Godfrey to find out what those odd-looking entries are, and it turns out they are ‘analytics’, that is, separate references to entries within a larger book. The view on that WorldCat page evidently isn’t set up to show the ‘in’ information on those (It’s quite likely that the ‘author’ field is used for something else for analytics), which is too bad. It’s a problem with anything fairly simple involving a complicated database.
Anyway, just a Thing I Saw on the web.
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-Vardibidian.