title: Magento: Attribute with thousands of values/options
body: <p>I'm creating a Book store in Magento and am having trouble figuring out the best way to handle the Authors of a Book (which would be the product).</p>
  
  <p>What I currently have is an Attribute called "authors" which is multi-select and a thousand [test] values. It's still manageable but does get a little slow when editing a product. Also, when adding an option/value to the authors attribute itself, a huge list is rendered in the HTML making this an inefficient solution. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is there another approach I should take?</li>
  <li>Is it possible to create an Author object (entity type?) which is associated to a product through a join table? If yes, can someone give me an explanation about how that is done or point me to some good documentation?</li>
  <li>If I'd take the Author object approach, could that still be used in the layered navigation?</li>
  <li>How would I show the list of all books for a single author?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>
  
  <p>PS: I am aware of extensions like Improved Navigation but AFAIK it adds something like attributes to attributes themselves which is not what I'm looking for.</p>
  
  <p>For Googlers: The same would apply for Artists of a music site or manufacturers.</p>