Talk on scholarly editing at the National Library of Scotland, 9 Nov 2011

Textual Editing in Principle and Practice: What Are You Reading? Lecture 2

Dr Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen) and Dr Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University)

National Library of Scotland, 9 November 2011, 6pm (free)

Why should you buy a book for £6.99 when you might have the same title for 1.99? Is it just the price?  The quality of the paper and cover?  Or might the text itself—the words you’ll be reading—be different?

Why does a research library like the NLS hold so many copies of the same title? What difference does it make to read one copy rather than another?  Why are so many books even needed?

The books that we buy in bookshops or read in libraries may have the same titles, but they are often very different—they may contain different words; sometimes a crucial scene or even the ending may vary.  Some editions will alert the reader to these differences—others will just print the most easily available text.  In this series we will look at some famous examples of texts which have more than one version, and guide you through the choices editors make in order to produce a text for the informed reader.

In this lecture, the second of the series, scholars working on major editions of key Scottish authors will explore how modern editors set about producing an edited text. What are the principles we adhere to? What is the evidence that counts in valuing one state of the text over another? Should we prefer the author’s first or last version? How should we treat the author’s original  manuscript? In the second part of the talk we will demonstrate the process of editing, in particular how we can benefit from the latest technological advances.

• Why we edit books. Dr Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels)
• How we edit books. Dr Anthony Mandal (New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson)

Part of the ‘What Are You Reading’ series of lectures and workshops. For more information download the ‘What Are You Reading’ information sheet PDF (122 KB, 2 pages).

Please book your tickets online or call the NLS directly on 0131 623 3918.

Stevenson Edition receives funding from Royal Society of Edinburgh

We’re delighted to announce that a bid submitted to support work on the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson earlier this year to the Royal Society of Edinburgh was successful. The bid was entered into the recently launched RSE Arts & Humanities Major Research Grants competition, which makes awards of up to £175,000 provided by the Scottish Parliament in order to support ‘investigations in Scotland that will lead to advances in creativity, intellectual insights and knowledge that are of value to the research community and of use in wider social contexts’ [RSE website].

Running from April 2011 to March 2014 and directed by Penny Fielding (Edinburgh) and Anthony Mandal (Cardiff), the grant of just over £150,000 will assist the development of the Edition’s infrastructural mechanisms and directly support the publication of 13 volumes of our first wave, as well as contributing to various digital resources and events over the next three years.

In this funded phase of the project, the editorial team will bring out Collected Essays (5 vols), The Dynamiter, St Ives, The Amateur Emigrant, Prince Otto and a volume of Stories. Three further volumes, Weir of Hermiston, Kidnapped and Catriona, will also be far advanced at this stage and the transcriptions of their manuscripts deposited in our publicly accessible online archive.

The project team are grateful to the RSE, whose generous support will ensure that the EdRLS team will be able to generate a sizeable quantity of volumes in our first phase, while maintaining the highest scholarly and production standards.

Fuller details are available here: http://edrls.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/rse-grant/.

CFP: Mervyn Peake Conference 2011

Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition : A Centenary Conference

An international conference hosted by the English & Creative Writing Department, University of Chichester and the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy

15–16 July 2011 Chichester, UK

Keynote Speakers include: Joanne Harris | Michael Moorcock | Peter Winnington | Colin Manlove | Farah Mendlesohn | Sebastian Peake

This conference and related events next July to mark the centenary of Peake’s birth include exhibitions of his paintings and illustrations in Chichester (Peake lived in nearby Burpham while writing the Gormenghast books, and is buried there). July 2011 is also the publication date of Titus Awakes, Maeve Gilmore’s conclusion of her husband’s Gormenghast sequence. The conference will celebrate, explore and discuss the many facets of Peake’s rich creativity, including his work as fantasy novelist, children’s writer, playwright, poet, writer of nonsense verse, artist and illustrator (both of his own books and classics such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Hunting of the Snark, the Alice books, Treasure Island and the Grimms’ Household Tales).

News from the Stevenson Edition volume editors: the Essays

Stevenson, essayist
According to the essay editors:

One of our main aims is to make clear the importance of Stevenson as an essayist. In his own lifetime and in the following decades, his essays were included among his most important works. But with Modernism, the personal essay (despite its noble ancestry from Montaigne onwards) fell into disrepute—was even declared to be ‘dead’. In part this is because the essay is in an undefined position at the edge of the literary system, yet it is a focus of innovative writing in the USA today.

By providing a proper edition with notes, background information to composition, variants and an index we hope to allow both scholars and ordinary readers to take a fresh look at these works. People in the past who have read them have always been very impressed, then surprised to see so little written about them. Our edition hopes to make clear the importance of Stevenson’s essays—and even if it doesn’t, the editors are enjoying working together on the project anyway.

Visit the Stevenson Edition blog to read the full post.

News from the Stevenson Edition volume editors: Kidnapped

The Kidnapped manuscript

Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming) is now at work on one of Stevenson’s masterpieces, Kidnapped. She reports that interesting problems with the manuscript start right from p. 1: ‘Just where did young David Balfour set out from? Generations of schoolchildren know that David’s travels began in Essendean—or did they? Without giving the game away, let me say that this is a matter of some doubt in the manuscript held at the Huntington Library. So what name will appear in the New Edinburgh Edition? This depends on some editorial choices yet to be made. So watch that space … ‘ “Mr. Campbell, the minister of [?         ] was waiting for me by the garden gate.” ’

Visit the Stevenson Edition blog for more details.

Major new Stevenson manuscript: In the South Seas

by Richard Dury, General Editor of the Stevenson Edition

A major Stevenson manuscript has recently come to light in Ireland. It is a collection of over 90 pages of drafts for his planned historical, cultural and anthropological work on the Pacific islanders, In the South Seas.

The manuscript had never been previously heard of, not being included in the big auction of Stevenson books and manuscripts after his widow’s death in 1914, nor in any subsequent sale of Stevenson material. It will be auctioned at Christie’s of New York on 3 December this year.

Visit the Stevenson Edition blog for more details.