New Hymnal for American Youth: Century vs. Revell

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Haruo's picture

I have a copy of "New Hymnal for American Youth", published 1930, edited by H. Augustine Smith, and that was in the database as NHAY1930, but when I tried to find the first hymn in it, "Father of Lights", it wasn't listed. I started checking the list and found several other discrepancies between the contents of my copy and the DNAH list. Then I noticed that my copy was published by D. Appleton-Century, whereas the database said the publisher was Revell.

So I created a new hymnal page, NHAC1930, for my copy, and added the four songs that mine has but Revell lacks (actually there are quite a few more, but the others are all one-stanza pieces, much of it service music, so may have been omitted intentionally from DNAH (?)...

Here are the discrepancies I noted:

Four hymns of more than one stanza omitted in NYAC1930:
Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve #195
Father of lights #1
Hark, hark, my soul #329
Who goes there, in the night #261

Fourteen one-stanza pieces omitted in NYAC1930; most of these are in the service music section beginning at #334, but a few are not (I've *starred those I think are not in this category; I'm actually surprised to see the Lutkin benediction where it is rather than with the service music):
All things come of thee, O Lord #341
Bless thou the gifts #340
Day is done, gone the sun #344
Glory be to the Father #335
Hear our prayer, O Lord #342
Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts #336
*If I can stop one heart from breaking #242
Let the words of my mouth #338
*Little things that run and quail #243
O come, let us worship #343
Praise God from whom all blessings flow #334
*Temper my spirit, O Lord #173
The Lord bless you and keep you #25
*To every man there openeth #232

Two hymns where NYAC1930 may have a different text:
NHAC1930
God that madest earth and heaven #18
vs NHAY1930
[O] God, who [that] madest [made the] earth and heaven [sky]

NHAC1930
Let us with a gladsome mind #32
vs NHAY1930
Let us with a joyful mind

How did the same editor manage to publish two identically titled hymnals with so nearly identical contents yet such glaring differences in the same year with different publishing houses in the same country?

Haruo


Comments

DNAH indexers typically did not index hymns if they had one stanza. It is also not unusual for a few hymns to be missing from the DNAH list. In some cases, sections of the alphabet are missing such as hymns starting with "Hark." The first lines in DNAH hymnals are also generic, so, for instance, if the hymn is "Let us with a gladsome mind" in the hymnal, it will always be "Let us with a joyful mind" in the DNAH index.

I went to church today, and found six copies of the New Hymnal for American Youth on the library shelves. Five of them, like the one I have, were D. Appleton-Century, but lo! and behold one of them was Revell, and on comparing it with my list of differences, I am satisfied that the contents are identical. So I guess the data currently under NHAC1930 should be copied over to NHAY1930.

Somebody replaced the NHAC1930 data with the NHAY1930 data, so my improvements have been lost. Maybe "copied over to" was misinterpreted. I guess I'll go in and redo it, adding in the one-stanza hymns and replacing the DNAH hymn numbers and first lines with the real ones.

And all their hymns (even the one-liners) are present. NHAC1930 and NHAY1930 are now both present and accounted for. I stripped all the [those] bracketed alternative wordings (DNAH placenta) from the first lines, and made occasional other improvements. I also found that a lot of the hymns showed duplicate authors (e.g. first author listed J. M. Neale; second author listed John M. Neale; third author listed Andrew of Crete...) and in such cases (I'm sure I didn't catch them all!) I generally deleted the one that didn't match the page, and changed the one that was really a translator into a translator.

In a few cases I supplied full texts, two of them (I think) under copyright (and one case where the current copyright status is unclear; I erred on the side of caution).

And I wondered why there was no Person Page for William Arthur Dunkerley, which was John Oxenham's real name. (I used to wonder why Oxenham's texts tended to by held in copyright by young ladies named Dunkerley...)

And I discovered that when Full Text says it's "Full HTML" that doesn't mean that < ol>< li>< /li>< li>< /li>< /ol> will create an ordered, numbered list of stanzas, though apparently it will here:

... And all my efforts to make italics, whether with < i > or with < em >, came to naught. Is there someplace I can find out what the real limitations on code are here? I notice that ALT+0171, which normally produces a double <<, here produces a Turkish Ğ (and the close-quote >>, Alt+0187, yields——–• the lower-case ğ. But ALT+0151, which normally gives an em-dash, here is simply ignored. Alt+0172/0188 is the Esperanto Ĵĵ. Are the other Esperanto letters here for my use and nobody told me, or what?

Haruo

Sorry, full text is actually plain text. All HTML tags are removed. I have updated the description on the field to reflect this.

But UTF-8 characters should be preserved. Pressing a sequence of keys like Alt+0171 is a Windows feature. So if you are pressing that sequence expecting a left angle quote to appear but something else appears instead, then you may need to look at the localization/internationalization settings on your computer.

Full *text*; I'm so used to seeing the ones that say "Filtered HTML" that I didn't even read what was in front of me.

I still think it's odd that Alt+0xyz results in odd Turkish letters in that one field. Everywhere else on my computer (and the public library computers I frequently post from) «» results in pointy quotes, including everywhere else in hymnary text boxes (Filtered HTML and plain text alike). That was the only place it resulted in something else, and the only place I couldn't use the same system to produce —, © and other ASCII symbols I frequently need here. Obviously there are other ways to get the characters in question, but none is as efficient in my experience. (I generally use ek.exe or tajpi.exe to do the Esperanto letters (ĈĉĜĝĤĥĴĵŜŝ), or the virtual keyboard at typeit.org if I'm on a public terminal. But anyhow, I think the odd localization/internationalization settings are something to do with the encoding of that box or page at your end, not mine.

line break tags function... i.e. < b r   / > results in a line break.