Quote:
Originally Posted by pynch
Depends. As my Complete Works collections often have thousands of pages, I do not proof-read the single books when they are sourced from more or less reliable sites (Gutenberg, Adelaide University, for example). For those I only check and correct the paragraph and character formatting.
For ocr’d scans it’s different, of course. I usually proof-read them and correct in my text only what’s different from the scans (all of the Virginia Woolf diaries and letters), but sometimes I only do double spell-checks (De Quincey, for example). If I live to be 250 years, I’m gonna revise them all, but for the time being, I prefer to make all of the texts of an author available instead of only some of them perfect. The certified HarryT-approachİ with word-by-word and line-by-line comparisons I have only used for the pre-published Finnegans Wake chapters so far.
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Thanks. Both approaches certainly have merit, but I'm afraid I can't agree with the view that PG is a reliable source - I've found literally thousands of errors in some PG books. The worse example was probably the PG version of Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop", which had two instances of a complete double page of text having been omitted, several missing paragraphs, and numerous lesser infidelities. That's why I always attempt to proof against a printed (or scanned) edition, because although one can correct errors that are present using a spell-checker, there's no way to correct text that's not there at all.
Modern PG editions are much better. The basic problem is that most of the classics are among the oldest PG books, and hence the least reliable. PG don't appear to have any sort of programme for re-doing old books.