[chaley]

This probably should have been its own thread rather than being added to this one. You are asking a different question, one that is probably of interest to many people.

Originally Posted by Stampercam

I really love the subcategorisation of authors by letter, this has been a great upgrade feature. What I'd like is to be able to click on (for example) A and not just see the authors in that subcategory but have all the books from all the A authors show up in the book list (I think that sounds better in my head somehow).

Others have asked for this. It isn't clear how to do this efficiently, so I haven't done it. I don't know that I ever will, as it isn't high on my own priority list.

In the absence of that ability is there a search string I can enter that will show me all titles that have author surname starting with "a" or "b" etc?

Use search with regexp. For these examples, I assume that your author_sort is set up LN, FN (Surname comma firstname). For example, to find books by authors with surname beginning with 'a', search for

author_sort:"~^a"

To find all authors with names beginning with a or b, search for

author_sort:"~^[ab]"

or

author_sort:"~^a" or author_sort:"~^b"

The same works for other fields. For example, to find series beginning with 'a', search for

series:"~^a"

By way of explanation, the quotes are there just in case there are spaces in the regular expression. In the examples above, the quotes aren't necessary, but I usually add them anyway. The ~ tells calibre's search to use the regular expression that follows the character. The regular expression is ^a. The ^ character says that what follows next must match the beginning of the field. The next character, a, is what must match.

For the example ^[ab], the [ ] indicate that any of the characters within the brackets must match.