DAVID BARRIE
Sunday, 6th June 2010. On retouching.
John Law Media plan to release a Kindle version of Wasp-Waisted this summer, and they’ve given me the opportunity to revise the text before they do so. So I reread it (which I’d not done since it was published) and tweaked some lines that struck me as a little clumsy, as well as getting rid of all references to the non-existent magazine inside Franck’s MR73 revolver (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean). This of course means that the text of the published version will not be identical to that of the digital one (until the next print edition comes along i.e. the moment at which the publisher thinks it’s worth spending money on resetting the text before launching an additional print run). From a scholarly point of view, this is the beginning of a nightmare scenario, as uncontrolled variants creep into the text and the work loses its definitive nature, becoming an indistinct cloud of alternative versions. However, as nobody’s likely to start writing a Ph.D. thesis on the work of David Barrie in my lifetime (nor, indeed, after it), I can’t say I see this as a great concern.
However, it turns out that the Kindle’s distribution system allows publishers to adjust the text of a book as often as they like, since anyone who has previously purchased it will automatically receive an updated version if changes are made. For writers who attach great importance to the perfection of their entire oeuvre, this is good news. You might such an obsession would be rare (who, after all, can be bothered going back over their traces?), but even good old Balzac spent hours inking in corrections on his copy of the complete Comédie Humaine (the Furne edition), which scholars have subsequently chosen to integrate into the definitive texts of his works (not everyone agrees with this – the online edition of la Comédie sticks to the Furne).
Given such a facility, you’ve got to wonder whether Conan Doyle wouldn’t have gone back and erased the Reichenbach falls episode in The Final Problem in order to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of having to resuscitate Sherlock Holmes to keep the fans happy....
John Law Media plan to release a Kindle version of Wasp-Waisted this summer, and they’ve given me the opportunity to revise the text before they do so. So I reread it (which I’d not done since it was published) and tweaked some lines that struck me as a little clumsy, as well as getting rid of all references to the non-existent magazine inside Franck’s MR73 revolver (regular readers of this blog will know what I mean). This of course means that the text of the published version will not be identical to that of the digital one (until the next print edition comes along i.e. the moment at which the publisher thinks it’s worth spending money on resetting the text before launching an additional print run). From a scholarly point of view, this is the beginning of a nightmare scenario, as uncontrolled variants creep into the text and the work loses its definitive nature, becoming an indistinct cloud of alternative versions. However, as nobody’s likely to start writing a Ph.D. thesis on the work of David Barrie in my lifetime (nor, indeed, after it), I can’t say I see this as a great concern.
However, it turns out that the Kindle’s distribution system allows publishers to adjust the text of a book as often as they like, since anyone who has previously purchased it will automatically receive an updated version if changes are made. For writers who attach great importance to the perfection of their entire oeuvre, this is good news. You might such an obsession would be rare (who, after all, can be bothered going back over their traces?), but even good old Balzac spent hours inking in corrections on his copy of the complete Comédie Humaine (the Furne edition), which scholars have subsequently chosen to integrate into the definitive texts of his works (not everyone agrees with this – the online edition of la Comédie sticks to the Furne).
Given such a facility, you’ve got to wonder whether Conan Doyle wouldn’t have gone back and erased the Reichenbach falls episode in The Final Problem in order to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of having to resuscitate Sherlock Holmes to keep the fans happy....