#%@*&%#@ Textual differences!
OK, I'm trying to produce a really good illustrated edition of
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, rather like the illustrated edition of
Kim by Rudyard Kipling that I did.
Kim was bad enough — American editions, lots of revisions to the text in the publication history. But there was a late-on definitive edition with the last changes made by Kipling, with no messing about (well, except that the US version of this edition Americanized some spellings - grrrr!).
With Kidnapped I though it was similar. First published in 1886, with various revisions along the way to the 1894 edition, with the 1895 edition including all the changes RLS made before he died.
But there are two 1895 editions by the English publishers, Cassel — the revision to the 1894 edition, and also a special "Edinburgh" edition. And there are LOTS of differences between the 1895 and the 1895 Edinburgh edition, especially in punctuation.
But OK, I proofed my text against a copy of the 1895 Edinburgh edition. A very tedious task. And then I do a final double-check, and I find a note on a plausible web site, saying that the Edinburgh Edition failed to include lots of changes that were in the normal 1895 edition! Argh...
So I go to the 1886 edition to check against both 1895 editions. And I find that the 1886 and 1895 punctuation is very similar, but the 1895 Edinburgh punctuation is very different - presumably corrections that got into the Edinburgh edition, but not the ordinary edition, you'd think... (& I certainly did...)
And then I think to check out the American 1886 Edition — aargh... on first glance, it looks like its punctuation matches the 1895 Edinburgh Edition!
So now I need to compare:
1886 UK version
1886 US version
1895 UK version
1895 Edinburgh version
and see which plausibly has the latest changes, and incorporate them into my edition. I have had a quick look at the Penguin Classics edition, and that hasn't even included some of RLS's corrections that made it into the UK 1895 edition, so that's not a lot of help!
All I want is a nice clean text, reflecting the last corrections the author made himself - it had been in print for 8 years by the time he died, so I think that is the best text to go for. I suspect that the 1895 UK edition is going to be cleanest, but there are definitely some changes to spelling in the 1895 Edinburgh edition that really out to be in my edition (and sometimes more than spelling - correctly using 'Scots' instead of 'Scotch' in several places.)
Wretched publishers of 115 years ago! Why couldn't they have got it right in the first place! Bah!
And then there's trying to explain all this in the blurb for my edition.....