[jgray]

Not being satisfied with the available PD offerings, I decided to look at "The Norton Shakespeare". This seems to be a highly recommended annotated version of all the plays and sonnets.

While looking online for pricing, I found that Norton was available as a single very thick hardback or as two thinner paperbacks. I was going to get the two volume paperback set, as it was not only less expensive, but the pages are thicker than the hardback. The best price I found for the paperback set was $60 shipped.

One frustrating thing about this book is that nowhere online could I find any excerpts. I wanted to make sure that this version used the modern spellings. This fact was not mentioned anywhere.

To settle the question of old/modern spellings, I visited the local Barnes and Noble. The sales person was very helpful. He thought he had a copy, but didn't know if it was in paperback or hardback. It wasn't even on the shelf. After searching the stock room, he returned with the hardback edition, which was the only copy in stock. It was $75. Opening the book, I did find that Norton uses modern spellings.

After some discussion with the sales person, he told me he could match the online B&N price. For some reason, their online price was only $50 for the hardback. I still would have preferred the two volumes in paperback, but for the price, I walked out with the hardback.

I am not too deep into the book yet, but I do like the numerous annotations in the right column and the additional pages of information. Other than having a three inch thick book to deal with, my only real complaint is the small text size, which is necessary to keep the page count to just over 3400.

For the curious, the body text is 9pt, the annotations and footnotes are 8pt. The line numbers (every five lines) are 7pt. As you can see (or not, as in this case) the text is rather small.

This last point (no pun intended) brings up another problem with an otherwise excellent book. I looked everywhere, but this book does not seem to be available in ebook form. A book of this size would have been much preferred as an ebook. Considering the formatting nesessary for the annotations, epub probably would not have worked well. However, I would have gladly welcomed a PDF version. Not only would it weigh less, I would be able to zoom in to make things more readable.

A word of caution to those looking to buy the paperback edition. There are several different paperbacks, with different compilations. What I wanted was the two volume set of "early plays" and "later plays". Other books have the plays broken into genre (tragedy, comedy, history, etc.). If you buy them by genre, you have to buy more books to get all the plays, thus costing more. This is all very confusing and poorly explained in the online descriptions. One further note: the second edition of Norton was just published in 2008. That is the edition I bought.

Joe