Distinguish between publisher and imprint; allow merging and linking

[jfinkhaeuser]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This is a bit nitpicky, I suppose.

"Panther Books, Ltd." published science fiction; their logo/name on the book is "panther", while they visibly labelled books as "panther science fiction" on the front cover. They were later bought by Granada, and then became an imprint of theirs. Granada got sold to Collins. Collins merged with Harper into HarperCollins.

The latter mergers don't matter much in this story. But you now have editions of a book published by "Panther" or "Panther Science Fiction" where the actual publisher is "Panther Books Ltd", and a later edition under the same label, but now it's an imprint of Granada, so the publisher is no longer the same.

It'd be nice to reflect this somehow.

Describe the solution you'd like
I think in terms of data management, the best thing to do is to distinguish between publisher and imprint. An imprint should have a canonical name and aliases, such as "panther" and "panther science fiction". Imprints should furthermore have a history of publishers associated with them, such as "Panther Books Ltd' and "Granada". Adding publisher aliases may also be useful, but that's technically less important.

Add an imprint field to the publisher field.

a) When typing in the imprint field, auto-complete from canonical and alias names. When one is selected, jump to the publisher field. Auto-complete the publishers, but - whether anything is already entered into the field or not - put the publishers associated with the imprint into a top section of the auto-complete drop-down, so they're more easily selected.

b) When typing into the publisher field, auto-complete from publishers. When a publisher is elected, jump to the imprint field, essentially doing the same as above.

Note that if the publisher imprint association is 1:1, there is little need to auto-complete. Just fill in the field.

Additional context
It'd be good to have some kind of edit interface for publishers and imprints, so the above mess can be cleaned up eventually.

[jfinkhaeuser]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Books fwiw