John Dandola

death dates of real people in a book, locale, time period). Unfortunately, this is usually ignored and getting CIP to make a correction is difficult at best.

What further complicates matters is that CIP does not use name suffixes such as "Jr.", "I", "II", "III", etc.—not even when cataloging kings and queens. Their method is to put the proper name along with the birth and death dates associated with that name. In John's case, since he writes so often about inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr., the CIP information always initially supplies his books with the information for the father, John Hays Hammond, Sr. (a mining engineer who died before any of these novels takes place). Also part of the problem is that CIP thinks that the name John Dandola applies to multiple people because he writes fiction, non-fiction, plays, and screenplays. Trying to get them to undo that misconception has proven to be a complete impossibility.

In short, it must be remembered that the Library of Congress is a government agency and considering that even having the word "library" in its title would make it a bastion of accuracy seems to be as erroneous an assumption as thinking your mail will be delivered to the correct address in a timely fashion.

In future, John's publisher has washed its hands of CIP and delays on future books will be avoided.

Dead in Small Doses has been ready for printing since the summer of 2011 with a targeted publication date of late September 2011. The only delay was waiting for the Library of Congress to assign information which had to be typeset and included on the copyright page of the book. What was supposed to take seven to ten days stretched into four months. Only during the fourth month, was it finally revealed that this was due to "layoffs" but the process was already under way and could not be undone. Therefore, a September debut became an October debut became a November debut and now, finally, a January 31, 2012 debut...

The long-awaited information is called Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) and John's publisher has been part of that program since its inception. CIP gives the subjects which makes it easier for libraries to catalog a book. The scope of the program is very limited since it only deals with certain subject matter and books over a certain page count. What usually trips up CIP is a lack of imagination so publishers often supply the correct information (birth and