Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What needs to be done to to get the Pangborn stuff into shape for reprint?
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A lot. Each title is something of a jigsaw puzzle.
There are, for example, at least six complete drafts of a Mary/Edgar novel collaboration called LIGHT ANOTHER CANDLE, all different from one another, plus hundreds of incomplete pages from the same. (Page numbers on these fragments don't align with any of the complete texts, of course. That would be too easy.) What you have to do is go back and forth with the complete drafts until you have a "final master" text, and then you have to laboriously hunt through that text and the fragments to see whether any of them should be integrated into the master, and if so how.
It isn't quite so bad on some of the old Edgar titles that had already seen print, but even there it takes a lot of time and careful thinking to integrate his post-publication edits with the familiar texts in a way that is faithful to Edgar's apparent intent.