Re: New edition of HPL from Oxford University Press
Posted by:
Knygatin (IP Logged)
Date: 19 July, 2014 02:25AM
Picked up the following comment from an Amazon review, for what it's worth. According to this, it seems as if Joshi took Lovecraft's old manuscripts, and added bits he found in them to the 'corrected' Arkham House editions, without really taking into consideration whether Lovecraft wanted these bits in his final versions:
"The reference to 5,000 words excised from "At the Mountains of Madness" is also misleading, even if technically true. The difference between the Joshi version of "Mountains", and the older Arkham House texts which followed HPL's final instructions, is only about 230 extra words, which Joshi "restored" from earlier drafts. It may be true, as you say, that about 5,000 words were excised from the original magazine appearance, but this is irrelevant to most people, because that version is not on sale anywhere. If 5,000 words were excised in the magazine, Lovecraft evidently restored 4,770 of them on his hand-corrected copies, resulting in the Arkham House texts, and texts derived from the Arkham House texts, which everyone read before Joshi's versions came alone. The other 230 words that Lovecraft did not restore were, presumably, the words he did not want."