Re: The Face in the River
Posted by:
jdworth (IP Logged)
Date: 14 May, 2009 11:05PM
Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> as they go to the effort to reexamine the
> manuscripts and various publications of tales to
> supply the most accurate and authoritative version
> -- or at least the closest to the author's final
> intent (or, in some cases, original intent, as
> with the publication of the facsimile of the ms.
> of Frankenstein) as it is possible to get.
>
> I almost missed this. Yes, and then they screw up,
> and propagate corrupt texts, anyway, because,
> although they are well-meaning, they are amateur
> editors working with underfunded, understaffed
> amateur publishing houses. So, instead of paying
> $6.95 for a Ballantine paperbound book with
> errors, one pays $30 for a hardbound book with
> errors. Big improvement, from the perspective of
> the reader! Lol.
Sadly, there is a fair amount of truth to this complaint... though I'm afraid it goes across the board with publishing these days.
I worked for quite a few years as a typesetter for a company which did all sorts of university press books and the like, and there were frequently times I wanted to hunt down some starry-eyed newbie editor and chop them into mincemeat. Why? Because I got to see the original manuscript, with their "corrections", which not infrequently meant they took perfectly lucid (if often not particularly impressive) prose and turned it into utter gobbledygook.
But these days, it seems to be simply, as you point out, lack of funding, lack of staff, and an overly crowded publication schedule, resulting in a plethora of errors creeping in without going through a final proofreading to catch and correct them. I'd much prefer a longer wait on a book, if it meant they had the time to actually follow through on that sort of thing. But this doesn't seem to be confined to the small specialty press -- I see tons of errors in books by major publishers, whether paper or hardbound.
In any event, while they do have such errors, they nonetheless have material which has never been published before, or is lacking the editorial manipulation that so often went on with writers during the pulp era (as well as others), so even with such errors, we still have something much closer to the writer's intent. I urge much more effort in correcting the typos and the like, but I also commend the efforts made in bringing the rest of this to light.
(Mind you, if a publisher is able to bring out an inexpensive edition of such and remain viable, while avoiding the problems mentioned above, I'm all for it. However, I doubt that this is ever going to fit with the realities of the situation... but oh, how I'd love to be proven wrong....)