lakediver wrote:Anthologies can be a good way to find more obscure works or a starting point to search for ideas for further reading.
Thanks for flagging up these titles, Lakediver. Anthologies can be a fascinating and informative genre of literature. One of the volumes that survived a deep cull of my personal library of foreign language teaching books - I taught French and German before retirement from secondary education - was a 500-page compilation of articles entitled
The Teaching of German: Problems and Methods and covering just about every topic imaginable in the field. It served me well over the years and I can still remember purchasing it in a used book store in Evanston, near Chicago, back in the 1980s. Following the turn of the new milliennium, I myself contributed a couple of articles to foreign language teaching anthologies which eventually appeared in print, so I've experienced what it's like to be an anthologist from the inside too. The editor is the only person with an overview of the final publication and I didn't know who the other contributors were until a few months before publication date. At the same time I was acutely aware that I was one piece in a big jigsaw, imposing a duty on me to be original, to avoid repeating what the other contributors were probably saying, but to remember at all times that what I wrote had to complement the other articles and make the final picture complete.
Getting back to diving literature, I had observed from my modest collection how most the book-length titles were the work of a single author, while a tiny minority were the output of two authors. Multiple-author publications in the diving field tend to be journals, magazines and conference proceedings. Perhaps many (most?) book-writing divers are rugged individualists reluctant to contemplate the prospect of sharing the authorship of a single tome.
