Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
Brendan:
Thanks for the detailed recs! Have you yourself gotten to look at the formatting for A Pleasing Terror, esp. in epub? I have no problem paying $9.99 even for a writer who's now out of copyright, but for $9.99, the editing had better be good even with footnotes and extra content (are the footonotes out of copyright as well?).
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I'm afraid I haven't seen the epub. I own the Kindle edition, and the formatting generally seems solid. One annoyance is that, while there is a table of contents included, the Kindle doesn't recognize it as a table of contents, so that option is greyed out in the Kindle's navigation menu, and you have to select "go to beginning" and page back to the table of contents. A possibly-related issue is that when you select a story from the table of contents and navigate to it via the link, the story title shows up formatted incorrectly (on the left and not italicized), and you have to page back once and then forward again to get it to display properly (centered and italicized). This is a common problem with Ash-Tree's Kindle/PRC titles; I don't know whether the same would be true of the EPUB.
The footnotes are in-copyright; they're explanatory stuff from modern scholars, about sources and obscure references and what-not. Some of them also appeared in
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, Michael Cox's selection from James' ghost stories. They're neat if you're a James enthusiast, but not necessarily worth the added cost otherwise. I should amend my earlier statement: "For those who don't mind paying $10 for an e-book
and who are very into M. R. James, Ash-Tree Press' e-book edition of A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings is the one to get." For those not familiar with his stories, something like the Megapack would be a better initial selection. As I mentioned, all his major stories (barring "A Warning to the Curious") are there, and if the formatting is good it's a great deal for the price. There are, of course, public domain versions of all the stories in the Megapack, but many will have dire formatting. I've had good luck with the University of Adelaide's public-domain e-books in the past, but I haven't looked at
their versions of James.