memes

Published in 1986, Ghost Dance was Carole Maso's first novel. I know this not just because all the reviews talk about it, but because I wrote my thesis on another of Maso's books, and that involved doing quite a bit of research about her and her bibliography. That's why I was really puzzled when I came across this.

After a little bit (okay, a lot) of googling, I reached two not-very startling conclusions. One is that misinformation spreads a lot faster these days, thanks to the miracles of the internet, and the second is that it's always worth double-checking your databases. Data entry is a tricky business, easily mismanaged by those clumsy human fingers we all have.

I noticed, first of all, that while 27 Amazon sellers wanted me to purchase this book, none of them had entered any supplementary information about it. Odd. Nobody on LibraryThing owned a copy of the book, either. None of the Bookfinder or Alibris sellers knew much about it, either. And it was at Alibris that things became clear, because I finally searched by title instead of author. And noticed the ISBN problem.