Many book collectors are completists--i.e., if an author is known to have published fifty titles, then they won't rest until they've collected all fifty titles (however rare some of those titles may be). If a publisher announces a ten-volume series about raising orchids, the completist is going to want all ten volumes.
The economics of publishing aren't always favorable to completists--a publisher may plan to publish a dozen titles about a particular topic, for example, but in reality only the first three or four of those planned volumes ever actually get published. This can be frustrating for completists, until they encounter a dealer catalog or descriptive bibliography which notes that those three or four volumes were all published. Thus, although the completist will never be able to own the dozen titles planned, they can at least own all the titles that actually made it into the marketplace.
Publishers cut short their publishing plans for a wide variety of reasons. If the first one or two volumes of a series did not sell well (or garner a sufficient number of pre-publication subscribers), it usually made little sense to continue with the endeavor, especially if the planned volumes were expensive to produce. The volume below (originally published in three parts 1887-1888), was the first of a planned three-volume 1889 Author's Edition of The Art Album of New Zealand Flora:
Available by subscription in a binding of full calf, morocco or gilt-decorated cloth (as above), the chromolithographed plates were expensive to produce and the project bankrupted the publishers before the remaining two volumes could be published.
The four volumes below were the first volumes in what was to have been a comprehensive treatise on the pathology of tumors:
Because of the extremely hostile professional reception to some of the treatise's tenets, the author (Rudolf Virchow, considered the father of modern pathology) chose to discontinue publication of the remaining volumes of the treatise.
Since both of the above are landmark works about their respective topics, they are quite expensive whenever occasional copies surface in the marketplace. That, however, is decidedly not the case with many of the titles that carry the all published "stigma" -- a diligent search of independent bookstores frequently uncovers some very undervalued gems....
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