Gentlemen, First, let me thank you all for responding and offering suggestions. I appreciate it and I am learning things. However, it looks like my message is not getting across: The problem is not to retrieve only the authors whose last names begin with A: 1) which books have a second author? 2) who is the second author ? This is determined by table book_author column ordinal (which can be 1 or 2) - if there is only 1 author for a book then there is no ordinal 2 linked to book_author bookID and authID. The structure of the db: book id title sub_title descr comment bk_cover copyright ISBN language sellers author id first_name last_name book_author authID bookID ordinal categories and publishers are not realy relevant here... The code I have: $SQL = "SELECT b.*, c.publisher, a.first_name, a.last_name FROM book AS b LEFT JOIN book_publisher as bp ON b.id = bp.bookID LEFT JOIN publishers AS c ON bp.publishers_id = c.id LEFT JOIN book_author AS ba ON b.id = ba.bookID LEFT JOIN author AS a ON ba.authID = a.id WHERE LEFT(last_name, 1 ) = '$Auth' "; (PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE CODE) It gives me these results: *array* 6 => *array* 'id' => string '6' /(length=1)/ 'title' => string 'Nubia.' /(length=6)/ 'sub_title' => string 'Corridor to Africa' /(length=18)/ 'descr' => string '' /(length=0)/ 'comment' => string '' /(length=0)/ 'bk_cover' => string '' /(length=0)/ 'copyright' => string '1977' /(length=4)/ 'ISBN' => string '0691093709' /(length=10)/ 'language' => string 'en' /(length=2)/ 'sellers' => string '' /(length=0)/ 'publisher' => string 'Princeton University Press' /(length=26)/ 'first_name' => string 'William Yewdale' /(length=15)/ 'last_name' => string 'Adams' /(length=5)/ This is the first of 17 books and it would be sufficient if I were not so damned demanding. I know that there are several books in the list that have 2 authors. At least 1 whose last name begins with A is an ordinal=2 (which is not important when it comes to displaying) and there are a couple where there are 2nd authors whose names begin with other letters of the alphabet. It is these that I am targeting. My question is: How do I filter my query to weed out these renegades? Can it be done using a concat as Author1 and another concat as Author2 (in place of the first_name and last_name joins ? Or do I do another query just for the outlaws? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php