In a message dated 1/4/2005 2:24:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, shalesller@writeme.com writes:

There are huge differences between some editions, >including major plot changes between the two editions of Frankenstein, >and major bowlerdization in editions of other books. Yes, non->scholars care. I personally don't demand typo for typo, but I don't want >a portmanteau of texts that the author never saw and no editor ever >wrote.

Are both Frankensteins posted now? I'd love to compare the two. Whoever, whenever, gets to do T. H. White's Arthur cycle is going to go nuts--the books exist in at least five extremely different versions. I did a paper on it in grad school. I am devoutly thankful that I'll be dead before anybody has to do that task. The rest of this is partly OT: Recently someone accused me of reading Tom Swift, so out of sheer orneriness I went and did it. I DISTINCTLY remember, when I was twelve and my brother Bill was nine, Bill throwing a fit about all the things that were being blamed on the confederates, and I had to explain to him the difference between the Confederates and the confederates. Almost all of those references are gone now. In fact, the book that upset him the most--the one in which Tom Swift is hunting platinum in Siberia--the word does not appear once. I haven't read them for about 45 years (except for three that I read a few years ago when I was too ill to do anything at all requiring thought and had not yet discovered that The Shadow and Doc Savage were online), so I was amazed at how greedy and unsavvy Tom Swift is. His second-best friend, Mr. Damon, has been kidnapped, Our Hero has promised Mrs. Damon that he will get him back, and then Our Hero placidly goes back to work on his new invention. He almost never reports a crime to the police. And no matter what country he's in, he sees nothing wrong with taking gold, platinum, artifacts, and whatever the heck he wants. I don't know whether the author was that ignorant or just plain didn't care. Maybe that was legal in some countries about WWI era, but I doubt it. It certainly was illegal in Egypt. Joke of the day: Yesterday we were walking home from the grocery store and my husband, seeing a line of birds perched on an electric cable, said, "See, even the birds are online!" Anne