Omnibus

An Omnibus (Latin for "with all" — the same root as the bus you ride on) is usually several novels/issues collected in a single volume. In most cases, each installment had been published in some form, either as a standalone work, or as a part of another collection. Omnibuses are often published as a way to earn more money, or to release out-of-print installments. Another occasion is for a milestone, like the anniversary of a work or for the release of the last installment in a series. The publishing industry sometimes refers to these as "bind-ups".

Similar to the omnibus release is the manga industry's Tankobon, which is a recopilatory volume that collects a couple months' worth of weekly releases of one single manga, in contrast to the weekly releases published on periodic anthologies such as Shonen Jump.

They often end up being a Doorstopper.

Related to Anthology. Compare Compilation Movie, Patchwork Story, and Compilation Re-release. Contrast Multi-Volume Work.

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Examples:

Anime And Manga

• There's an Azumanga Daioh omnibus that compiles the entire series into a single volume. It's around 700 pages long.
• Viz has compiled Dragon Ball Z and Rurouni Kenshin into "Viz Big" editions that contain three or four volumes each. Both One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist have also received this treatment, but neither are under the Viz Big name.
• Dark Horse Comics has started doing this with many manga series, including several CLAMP works.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi is being re-released in Omnibuses in North America with a new translation job, in order to replace the first 21 volumes which had varying levels of dubious quality. Negima's predecessor Love Hina has been released by Kodansha Comics in the form of five Omnibus editions.
• Gunslinger Girl has a number of omnibus collections. The first two are three volumes each, and every subsequent one is two each.
  • It is likely that creator Yu Aida is aware of these overseas editions (the Japanese collections are all single volumes). He has created an Idolmaster 4-koma where one of the girls learns the word Omnibus.
• Attack on Titan received a 1000 page long "Colossal Edition" that compiles the first five volumes of the manga, courtesy of Kodansha Comics. Another "Colossal Edition" compiling volumes 6 through 10 was released the following year, and volumes 11 through 15 the year after that. It's safe to assume the rest of the series will follow suit.
• Sands of Destruction was compiled into two volumes after it completed its run in Dengeki Maoh; each volume is around 200 pages. Each one also includes a couple of omake comics.
• All 12 volumes of Death Note were compiled into a single 2400 page omnibus. It must be seen to be believed.
• The original 9 volumes of Genshiken were rereleased as 3 omnibus editions.
• GTO: The Early Years was originally published in 31 volumes, with around 9 chapters per volume. They were later republished in 15 deluxe editions with twice the material per book. Only the deluxe editions were released in English.

Comic Books

• Comics in the Star Wars Expanded Universe have been getting combined into books much larger than graphic novel. They're each called an "Omnibus", and contain two to three arcs, each composed of four comics. This started with the X-Wing Rogue Squadron series, which has a total of three omnibuses.
• Comic books in general nowadays tend to be collected in Trade Paperback editions collecting a story arc; hence Writing for the Trade.
  • Marvel and DC also put out "Essential" and "Showcase" editions of older comics: phone book-sized books in black and white collecting a larger series at a time, usually 20 issues or more. Plus the "absolute" editions, which are in color on high quality paper, usually with extras.
  • And of course both Marvel and DC have books called Omnibuses: Hardcover books with high quality pages larger than normal comics and with huge page counts, at the cost of a hefty price tag.
  • A bit more affordable per book, at least at the time of release, is the Marvel Masterworks series of hardcovers, which usually reprints around 10-12 issues worth of material in each volume.
• The original Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe comics have been compiled into paperback books.
• The first seven Danger Girl comics were reprinted in a paperback book.
• Bone was initially published as individual issues, which were collected into nine trade paperbacks... which were then republished as the One Volume Edition. It's a 1300-page tome.
• ElfQuest was at one point collected into a single limited-edition volume containing the original 20-part series - a mere 652 pages. (Strictly speaking a compilation of compilations, collecting 4 volumes containing 5 parts each.)
• Many of the older Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics have been published in omnibus form, as have many Angel ones. Ditto the early Buffy tie-in novels.
• Grendel has a series of six omnibus editions collecting everything published up until the end of 2011, with the exception of the two Batman Intercontinuity Crossover miniseries (due to licensing reasons) and the Silverback miniseries featuring Argent's Origins Episode (due to the original artwork reportedly being too deteriorated to reproduce). The first four omnibus editions collect all the main Grendel stories in order of internal chronology and the final two collect the Grendel Tales side stories not featuring any of the main successive Grendels.
• The French World War II Alternate History comic book Block 109 has an omnibus regrouping all stories set in this universe, titled Block 109: Univers.
• All 3 volumes of Hound were compiled into a single 504-page omnibus by Dark Horse Comics in 2022.

Fanfic

• Ma'at: The Chapters 1 & first two chapters have been bundled together for the Whateleyacademy site.

Literature

• 1Q84: Originally published as three separate volumes in Japan, this novel's English release combined all three into one really big book.
• French editor Omnibus published one of Paul Féval's Le Bossu, containing the namesake novel (500 pages+) as well as most of the continuation works by his son, Paul Féval jr., including the prequel La jeunesse du Bossu, the sequel Les chevauchées de Lagardère and the Spin-Off Cocardasse & Passepoil.
• Most of the Dragaera novels have been reprinted in omnibus editions, with two or three novels to a book.
• The Vorkosigan Saga also has a number of omnibuses; all of them have "Miles" in the title after the primary series protagonist except for Cordelia's Honor, which collects the novels where Cordelia is the protagonist. Memory — the capstone novel of the series — remains in print separately despite the fact that the two novels after it have already been collected as Miles in Love.
• The Sector General books have been collected into four omnibus editions of three novels each. Confusingly, the novels themselves are mostly Patchwork Stories pieced together out of shorter works.
• Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber series, which consists of two sets of five novels, has had several. The first set was originally collected as The Chronicles of Amber (logically enough). When the second set of novels came out, telling the tale of the son of the protagonist of the first set, the first set was reprinted as The First Chronicles of Amber, and the new set was published as The Second Chronicles of Amber. All ten novels were collected in The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles.
• The three Lord Darcy books (Murder and Magic, Too Many Magicians and Lord Darcy Investigates) were made into one book entitled Lord Darcy.
• The 12 Thieves' World books have been combined into 4 collections: Sanctuary, Cross-Currents, The Shattered Sphere and The Price of Victory.
• Lloyd Alexander's five Prydain books were joined into The Chronicles of Prydain.
• Harper Collins has published several one volume compilations of the seven The Chronicles of Narnia books.
• The "Invasion" series of Star Trek novels.
• Lord Peter, a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers' short stories starring Lord Peter Wimsey published in 1986.
• The Ciaphas Cain omnibusses demonstrate the kind of exaggerated propaganda Cain is used for: a commissar with bulging muscles standing triumphantly Atop a Mountain of Corpses with an unbelievably smug grin, or with a Blade Above The Shoulder and a smoking Hand Cannon. Note that Cain is tall but not particularly bulky, and prefers a smaller and more accurate laspistol to the monstrous bolt pistol he's shown with.
  • A weird example is the one that contains all the Genevieve books. It contains 4 books, but Genevieve is only a very brief cameo in one and only in two of four short stories in another.
• Dorothy Parker lives on almost entirely in various omnibus versions of her poetry and short story collections, originally created to entertain servicemen during WWII. The best known of her omnibuses are The Portable Dorothy Parker and The Collected Dorothy Parker.
• Many Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer novels series are reissued in omnibus form, each omnibus typically containing three novels. The Gotrek & Felix, Gaunt's Ghosts, Shira Calpurnia, and various Space Marine novels have received this treatment.
• All of the original 26 books in The Railway Series by the Rev. Wilbert Awdry were collected into a single volume called Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection. A similar book, Thomas the Tank Engine: The New Collection, exists for the first fourteen books by Wilbert's son Christopher. It has since been rendered dated by the publication of a new book in the series.
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy was reprinted as an omnibus in 1984, and it remains available that way to this day.
• The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka is an omnibus edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
• Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages comprises the first four Rihannsu novels by Diane Duane, with Swordhunt and Honor Blade merged back together and a few minor Orwellian Retcons for the sake of internal continuity.
• The original Strand Magazine prints of Sherlock Holmes have been collected in two famed facsimile Omnibus volumes, known as the Sherlock Holmes Illustrated Omnibus, complete with the illustrations by Sidney Paget and his colleagues.
• The Science Fiction Book Club printed an exclusive omnibus edition of the three Drake Maijstral books under the title Ten Points for Style.
• All the books in the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids series are this: a collection of disturbing and horrible short stories published into one book. There isn't a set amount of stories that are needed to complete a book, however; some have six stories, and others have up to twenty.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The first three ebooks have been collected into a paperback book, called Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The First Collected Episodes. The name implies that there will be more collections.
• The Lord of the Rings One Volume Edition combines the trilogy into a single book. This was originally an inversion, however, since Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings as a single novel only to see it broken into three volumes by the publisher.
• Out of This World:
  • Out of This World Choice is a republication of volumes 2 and 5.
  • Volumes 3 and 4 were republished together as an unnumbered book, using the same title as the series.
• The Great SF Stories: Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction is a series of two-book omnibuses that lasted for six volumes. The volumes republish the first twelve copies of The Great SF Stories, printed a few years after the first publication of the originals. The initial volumes presented each book separately, but later omnibuses would merge the two introductions into a cohesive whole, disguising its role.
• Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories: Volume 1 was created by choosing three previous collections and reprinting them as a single volume. The foreword is clear that this series was intended to be an omnibus for Dr Asimov's entire publication history.
• Brian Aldiss's A Science Fiction Omnibus: This book republishes three previous genre anthologies, Penguin Science Fiction (1961), More Penguin Science Fiction (1963), and Yet More Penguin Science Fiction (1964) in a single (enormous) volume.
• Foundation (1951) and I, Robot were published as a single volume by Octopus Books in 1984.
• Planet of the Apes: From 2017-2018, the older film/television novelizations were reprinted in four omnibuses by Titan Books:
  • Volume 1 collects the novelizations of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
  • Volume 2 collects the novelizations of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and Planet of the Apes (2001).
  • Volume 3 collects the four episode novelizations of the live-action series: Man the Fugitive, Escape to Tomorrow, Journey Into Terror and Lord of the Apes.
  • Volume 4 collects the three episode novelizations of Return to the Planet of the Apes: Visions from Nowhere, Escape from Terror Lagoon, and Man, the Hunted Animal.
• The Rest of the Robots: After this book was first published, the eight short stories were reprinted both as Eight Stories from The Rest of the Robots and under this title. The original book also includes The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.
• German publisher Heyne created Meine Freunde, die Roboter as a combination of both I, Robot and The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories.
• The Robot Collection contains The Complete Robot, The Caves of Steel, and The Naked Sun.
• Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's The Norby Chronicles: Ace Books began releasing omnibuses for the Norby books in 1986, starting with The Norby Chronicles (containing Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot and Norby's Other Secret), then Norby: Robot for Hire (containing Norby And The Lost Princess and Norby And The Invaders), and ending with Norby Through Time and Space (containing Norby and the Queen's Necklace and Norby Finds a Villain) in 1988.
• Unicorn Press published a volume with over 900 pages in 1950, titled Bland Beginning, Pebble in the Sky, Just for the Bride, The Owl and the Pussycat, with those four books; Bland Beginning by Julian Symons, Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov, Just For The Bride by Dorothy Park Clark, and The Owl And The Pussycat by Owen Cameron.
• Servire published a 500+ page volume in 1970, titled Science Fiction Omnibus, a Dutch translation of four American Science Fiction Novels; The Big Eye by Max Ehrlich, The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert A. Heinlein, Requiem by Robert A. Heinlein, and Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov.
• Codename Villanelle: Named After First Installment which is a Codename Title-type Protagonist Title for Oxana Borisovna Vorontsova.
• The series The History of Middle-earth has received an omnibus edition with the twelve volumes grouped into three books. Part 1 has volumes I-V (covering the early development of what would eventually become The Silmarillion), part 2 has volumes VI-IX (also known as The History of The Lord of the Rings), and part 3 has volumes X-XII (the later development of the setting, following the publication of The Lord of the Rings).
• All five of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books (not counting the later one by Eoin Colfer) were collected into one 800-page volume. Also included was the short story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe".
• The Beast Player: The main four volumes were published as two volumes in English (by Pushkin Children's Books in the UK and Henry Holt and Co. in the US).
• Cormac McCarthy:
  • The Border Trilogy, which comprises All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.
  • The Passenger, which comprises The Passenger and Stella Maris.
• Every Miss Marple book has been compiled into one really thick book called The Complete Miss Marple that comes with a suitcase for carrying it.

Web Original

• Googlebrains has Lack of Inspiration which is technically an omnibus.

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