"Michael Hart" writes:

Obviously, any scholar will be able to figure out which editions we have used without much effort, and those who are not scholars won't care which editions we used because they don't care if it is:

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.

"To be or not to be." "To be, or not to be." "To be; or not to be." or "To be: or not to be."

That's a strawman. In reality, there are large differences in Shakespearean text depending on which original text you take it from, and many people could be interested in which edition it was from.

To them, that is not the question, and a discussion of that question would shuffle them off this mortal coil into the land of dreams.

Behold the power of skimming and outright skipping of boring text.

As for this example, the person who did it first may not have had any idea of the difference in the second

That's all the more reason to always keep edition information.

We did this with Darwin, Shakespeare, etc.,

Really? Because I don't see it for Shakespeare, except for the first folio editions. (Now I see that the Collins editions have the name in the header but why not put the year? The introduction? The editor name? All things of interest to the non-scholar reader.) (I think I know the answer here, but can we get rid of the World Library Editions? We have replacement editions, and if we need more, there's numerous editions of Shakespeare we could use. Say the word, and I'll start scanning new editions of Shakespeare for DP to replace these.)

but I don't see the need to do it in cases in which the differences are all likely to be in typographical errors, margination, pagination, and other publishing items, rather than in the source material.

The major question, how can we tell the difference? I don't insist on pedantism, but I'd rather add the information to many books, so we get the "Leaves of Grass" and the "20000 Lieues sous les mers" right, instead of only adding to the books we know for sure had distinct editions and missing those books. In the same direction, non-scholarly readers want to know when the book they were reading was published and sometimes where. Is this Civil War novel written after WWI, with a view of the horrors of war? Was it written shortly after the Civil War and was published in New York, or Atlanta? Was it written during the Civil War, and then New York or Atlanta would really make a difference. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm