Firstly, I'll say that I was surprised, amused, but not at all offended by Fiona's criticism of Wordsworth Classics. Being an owner of a few of those, I pulled one off my bookshelf in an attempt to decipher the faults and flaws of my $10 paperback edition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Having never before encountered the topic of editions discussed in Friday's seminar, I can't say I found anything wrong with the text itself; there are line numbers, and the acts and scenes seem in accordance with the Oxford Shakespeare edition. [I mention the line numbers because the old anthology of Shakespeare I used to read from had no page numbers, let alone line numbers.] The superiority of the Oxford Shakespeare edition is in the notes and introduction; having a personal preference for footnotes as opposed to endnotes, the Oxford edition offers an abundance of informative and relevant footnotes, whereas the Wordsworth Classics edition offers endnotes at only a basic level, most of which give information which a dose of common sense could probably tell you. But if I had never been to yesterday's seminar in which we discussed the quality and effort put into different editions, I daresay I wouldn't have ever paid attention to such details and, if needing the text, would have simply grabbed the closest copy, or even decided on the slimmer Wordsworth edition, half the thickness of the Oxford Shakespeare. I suppose my point is that perhaps there are others like me, who may have recently had their eyes opened to the wide, complicated world of editions; as opposed to my ingenuous state before, when seeing a shelf of neatly arranged paperbacks with matching fonts, colours and aligned spines in a bookstore was enough assurance of an edition's authority and trustworthiness.
Onto the topic of this week's readings, Eric Leuschner offers a cultural history and critique on the obsession over a book’s external glamour:
"While the publishers and advertising touted the physical characteristics, emphasizing the external nature, little was said about the internal, that is, the work itself. It is as if the internal, or the content, is assumed to be worthy of the apparatus."
The concept of a text being ‘unworthy’ of its external pomp is an interesting one. I think we’d often regard the text itself (to be Romantic, the very essence of the text, not just the words printed on paper) as easily transcending its mortal coil of paper, thread, glue and ink. But to think the other way around, that perhaps the text doesn’t deserve its elaborate housing, makes the question of literary value or presence less philosophical and more a question of literary capital and commodity.
Leuschner tracks the commodity of books within the so-called “leisure class” (by which I assume he means non-academic readers) to the point in which they become luxury household furnishings; deluxe editions, he says, quoting a1930 article of Academy, are “a necessary furniture of the house – not of the mind”.
The detail Leuschner uses to describe these lavish deluxe editions – gilt edges, silk paper, engravings and ornate bindings – makes me wonder whether our modern taste in book-exteriors are a reaction against all this. I’m thinking specifically of Popular Penguins; those uniform, orange, $10 paperbacks; “Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price”. Gratifyingly simple, modest, appealingly clean cut and unadorned. Perhaps in 1900 “the abundant cheap editions of “classic” novels is a problem […] because of the attendant deterioration in the physical nature of the book”, but now it seems the Popular Penguins express a ‘back-to-basics’ campaign of books, when all texts are equal and the uniformity of those bold orange covers allow the text within to speak for itself.
