There's a lot of possible solutions to your problem, John. Here's a few ideas...
1) Probably the best idea is to take the information that duplicates itself into a separate lookup table. The Lookup Wizard make this fairly trivial to do.
2) From your question it sounds like you are storing a lot of information in two places. This violates database normalization rules and will cause a myriad of errors later on (typos, updates, and deletions all become royal RITA). You're much better off reworking the structure now than writing 17 workarounds for it later, even if it seems to take forever currently. I started off with a flat database with 60+ fields across it. I now have several smaller tables and accessing any of the data in it is not only straightforward, but possible in a fraction of the time.
Here's an excellent article on database normalization for beginners:
http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/MySQL/Normal/Normal1/page1.html
And if you do need to copy information from one record to another, try this Microsoft article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q210236
You can also use the slightly less code intensive Control-' to copy information from the LAST recorded entry in that field to this one. This will help if you're entering a series of books by one author all at once.
Take the time and a large sheet of paper and draw out what you need to have in your database. Separate it out into tables that only focus on ONE sort of data, and you only store one peice of data ONCE. (there are some rare exceptions to this, such as time-sensitive fluctuating prices on an invoice)
You won't regret it.
HTH,
David R
