(Another bogus in?) Google's metadata mish-mash

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Wed Dec 22 21:00:12 UTC 2010


Since the title
page<http://books.google.com/books?id=6M8TAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=1&f=false>(click
on thumbnail at top left) clearly says
>
> M.DC.XXXII

= 1632, I didn't see what you were basing your objection on, unless on the
date of the author, which could have been another person, or on a better
sense of history than mine (which is pretty poor). But page 124 has the
smoking... pistol (ignoring italics and long s's):

Mustafa, Dey or King of Algiers, in the Year 1706. returning from his not
> very successful Campaign against Tunis, was strangled before he entered the
> City, ...


Searching for Hindu-Arabic digits yields mostly false hits, but this is
another definite one (p117):

And to conclude, the Sum of what I there find, under the Year 1661. is no
> other, than that this Historian learns from Oran...


So the year on the title page is certainly not that of publication. It might
be the year the printing house was established (either Mears or Stone), but
as metadata for the book it's dead wrong. Nice find!

Mark

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

>
> But do you agree the title page is a
> misprint?  (Perhaps beyond Google's arena of
> responsibility, but perhaps something to add to
> your correspondent's blog, particularly since it
> eliminates this as an antedating.)
>
> Joel
>
> >On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > > At 12/21/2010 08:20 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
> > > >...
> > > >  4. The real thing!
> > > >     *A compleat history of the present state of war in Africa,
> between
> > > the
> > > >Spaniards and Algerines: ...*
> > > >     J Morgan.
> > > >     1632
>

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