A COLLECTOR’S GUIDE TO AAPG PUBLICATIONS*

Compiled by

Raymond P. Sorenson ¹

 Search and Discovery Article #100001 (2003)

Updated on: September 25, 2015

*Edited and revised by Karen Piqune, AAPG Foundation Library ([email protected])

¹Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Houston, Texas ([email protected])

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INTRODUCTION 

From its founding in 1917 as the Southwestern Association of Petroleum Geologists, a major focus of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) has been the dissemination of knowledge to its membership through publications.  Beginning with the Bulletin in 1917, the first books in the mid-1920s, multi-media in the 1960s, and digital publication through Datapages in the 1990s, AAPG has become one of the premier sources of reference material for the geological community. 

Throughout its history, AAPG has never provided a comprehensive list of its historical publications for its membership.  The most complete source of information on early material is Morley (1966), a 50-year history of AAPG published as volume 50 no. 4, pp. 669-820, of the Bulletin, and reprinted as a separate paperback book.  This reference captures most of the publications up to that time, and provides capsule summaries of many of the publication efforts, but gives primarily the dates and short titles rather than complete bibliographic information.   

Several Index volumes cover Bulletin technical papers and major book publications through 1990, after which the series was discontinued.  Included books are listed for each Index, but only in the form of abbreviated titles or series numerical designation.  Among other shortcomings, there is no mention of authors or editors.  Nonetheless, inclusion in an Index provided clues to a few long-forgotten works not listed elsewhere.   

AAPG began publishing books in 1926, with the production of Geology of Gulf Coast Oil Fields.  It eventually became difficult to keep track of an historical publication list, due to listings that typically only included dates and titles.  In 1962, “realizing that the numbering of such publications is of considerable convenience to librarians and authors”, AAPG started the Memoir series.  Since that time, almost as many numbered series have been generated as had books at the time the problem was originally acknowledged.  The proliferation of series designations with the advent of digital publication promises to make the record-keeping even more challenging in the future. 

The organization of this text and the manner in which books are described are designed to allow ease of identification in a library or used bookstore setting.  Locating many of these items can require knowledge of the physical dimensions and type of binding, particularly for those items that are not of standard book size.  For the same reason, books are here identified by authors or editors, rather than book title.  Within each category, publications have generally been listed in numerical order for the numbered series, or in chronological order otherwise.   

Several types of publications are not covered in detail.  These include (1) products of divisions and regional sections; (2) field trip guides and short course handouts, if not sold through the Bookstore; (3) program abstracts from conventions; (4) membership directories; and (5) online publications.  The proliferation of digital products in the past few years has generated a need for additional bibliographic work that is not addressed here.