Sir Walter Scott

[GeoffC]

If printing errors occurred in Sir Walter Scott's books, how many others are affected?


Extract from The Times Saturday 5th December 2009 ....

An epic feat of scholarship that set out to rescue the novels of Sir Walter Scott from a litany of 30,000 editorial gaffes and typesetting errors has finally been completed, 25 years after the project began.

The Talisman, re-published last month, is the last in a 28-book sequence that has seen a team of researchers finally eliminate errors scattered throughout the standard editions of the novels. The books are, at last, “as Scott would have wanted,” said Professor David Hewitt, editor-in-chief of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels.

In accomplishing his task, Professor Hewitt and a platoon of editors tracked down manuscripts and early 19th-century proof sheets in libraries in London, Edinburgh, New York and Moscow, comparing Scott’s originals with texts that had filled library shelves for generations. What they found shocked them: error after error strewn across every printed page.

Five or six mistakes a page is standard in the popular edition of each of the novels, with some pages containing ten or more. The final tally for each volume is enough to make a sub-editor blanch — 1,000 blemishes per book, the result of bad typesetting, accidental editorial errors and deliberate “improvements”.
Related Links

Turning to a single page of Waverley, Scott’s first and most famous novel, Professor Hewitt itemised five mistakes, including paragraphing where none was intended, the word “accident” printed as “incident”, “which” printed as “whom”, and “lord” printed as “laird”.

The fifth example, yet another misprinted word, destroyed the vividness of a speech by the character Gilfillan, a Protestant Covenanting soldier, who deplores the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church that he has witnessed in continental Europe.

“Scott has Gilfillan say: ‘O! it would grieve your honour’s soul to see the mumming, and the singing, and the massing that’s in the kirk . . .’” said Professor Hewitt. “‘Mumming’ makes complete sense there — there’s a notion of theatricality about it. But in print it turned out as ‘murmuring’, which completely loses the meaning that Scott intended.”

Some mistakes obscure vital elements of a book’s plot. In Kenilworth, editorial laxness had obscured the circumstances surrounding the death of Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who is pursued by the evil Richard Varney.

“We went back to the manuscript, and saw it made sense,” said Professor Hewitt. “There was a variety of drawbridge and the villain takes away the supports so that when Amy Robsart stands on it, it collapses and she falls into the ditch below. That made sense. But it made no sense in the existing printed version. Words and meaning have gone: you simply cannot work out why the drawbridge lets her down, and how the murderer has done it. So we restored the manuscript.”

[Dr. Drib]

Now we need these corrected editions as ebooks.


Don

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Now we need these corrected editions as ebooks.


Don

except they will now be copyrighted !

[HarryT]

AFAIK, this type of change cannot be copyrighted. There would be nothing wrong, I believe, in buying the corrected printed edition and using it to correct an eBook.

I'll leave the task of "correcting" the PG versions to someone else. I'm afraid that I find Scott a dreadfully tedious author!

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

AFAIK, this type of change cannot be copyrighted. There would be nothing wrong, I believe, in buying the corrected printed edition and using it to correct an eBook.

I'll leave the task of "correcting" the PG versions to someone else. I'm afraid that I find Scott a dreadfully tedious author!

just as long as the errors did not also affect Dickens ! .... ....

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

just as long as the errors did not also affect Dickens ! .... ....

Precisely because there were so many printing errors, late in his life, Dickens produced the "Charles Dickens Edition" of his books, which he personally checked for correctness. Pretty much all modern editions are based on those, but you still find variations in things like punctuation, capitalisation, and so on, between different editions.

I have the complete 36-volume hardback set of the "Oxford Illustrated Dickens", which is regarded as being pretty "authoritative", and it's those that I do all my proof-reading against.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by HarryT

AFAIK, this type of change cannot be copyrighted. There would be nothing wrong, I believe, in buying the corrected printed edition and using it to correct an eBook.

I'll leave the task of "correcting" the PG versions to someone else. I'm afraid that I find Scott a dreadfully tedious author!

I agree with that. I've read one book by him, and I had to struggle to continue with it, but finally finished it.

I would, however, like to have all of these corrected editions available for all the readers who love his work or are attracted to his writing.


Don

[Jellby]

I think I've seen this post somewhere else

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I think I've seen this post somewhere else

pppfffttt - coincidence !!

[Kali Yuga]

Aren't these kinds of issues rather common?

Plus they pale in comparison to problems facing some works. E.g. with Genji Monogatari, the originals were hand-written on scrolls and passed around somewhat surreptitiously; scholars don't know the actual intended order of many chapters; and there are concerns over the authorship of many chapters as well....

[zacheryjensen]

Originally Posted by HarryT

AFAIK, this type of change cannot be copyrighted. There would be nothing wrong, I believe, in buying the corrected printed edition and using it to correct an eBook.

Yeah, while you're probably right, it wouldn't necessarily stop them from trying to copyright it like a translator would copyright a translated version of, say, The Divine Comedy.

I think the saving grace here is their claim to have made more accurate representations of the original manuscripts and thus, by their own definition, their work is 100% derivative and not copyrightable.

Of course, courts have made more surprisingly ridiculous rulings in the past...

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by zacheryjensen

I think the saving grace here is their claim to have made more accurate representations of the original manuscripts and thus, by their own definition, their work is 100% derivative and not copyrightable.

Well... if it's such an accurate representation of the manuscripts, they should share whatever copyright the manuscripts have. Actually, it's the previous error-ridden editions that should have the extended copyright

[zacheryjensen]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Well... if it's such an accurate representation of the manuscripts, they should share whatever copyright the manuscripts have. Actually, it's the previous error-ridden editions that should have the extended copyright

Yes well I was, quite possibly wrongly, making the assumption that the originals were not copyrighted. But you're correct, if these new editions are merely accurate reproductions of the originals, then they would be property of the original copyright holder unless otherwise licensed by them.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm afraid that I find Scott a dreadfully tedious author!

but maybe now we know why.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by zacheryjensen

Yes well I was, quite possibly wrongly, making the assumption that the originals were not copyrighted. But you're correct, if these new editions are merely accurate reproductions of the originals, then they would be property of the original copyright holder unless otherwise licensed by them.

Scott died in 1832, so his original manuscripts are most certainly out of copyright .