Bookaholic

I’ve been publishing humanities texts (many public domain) for college for years now, and it took a jog of the mind from Jason Epstein (chief at Random House) to make me recognize that I’m the editor of a star lineup of authors, and since they’re all dead, I can edit more or less as I see fit. Sappho, Edgar Allan Poe, Whitman, John Milton (whoa — edit Milton? yes, I’ve done it).

One might call what I do semi-scholarly; I don’t have to satisfy academic journals, but I do have to address the needs and concerns of the wider public. “Public” is the key word, that’s what a “publish”-er caters to. Which carries a responsibility to serve the past and the future well.

In one of my prefaces, I recall the image of the author looking over my shoulder as I tinker with the words or the translation. If she/he were alive today, how should the text read? This concern has led to modernization of some texts, praise for Jowett’s remarkable style that somehow escaped Victorianisms or, as we might say today, being cutsie with the language by prettying it up with quaint words.

I have to believe that people actually said “anon,” and “forsooth” in Shakespeare’s day, but in my life I have never heard them spoken outside a Shakespeare play. That was one reason I created the Deadword Dictionary.

The audience, too, is smaller than one might suspect; at least, this is my assumption: that the classics are read primarily in late high school and early college, if at all. That narrows it down significantly, which works for me. I aim to find models, if I can find them, of the “breakthrough” type, usually in one’s twenties or thirties, as Milton with Areopagitica (though he’s more famous for his much later works) or Walt Whitman.

But now that Google and the Gutenberg Project have made so much public domain material available, does that mean my niche is gone? I don’t think so. The trick, in my mind, has been to create the simplest approach to difficult or important ideas. And I’m taking my cue from beer, coffee, and food products, the proliferation of their brands and slight variations over the past few decades, but with an assist from coding, to allow a reader choices of customizing a text as they prefer it –say, with or without the original language, modernized or not, genderized or not, format, ability to add notes, or read notes or links, audio, graphics, so that each customer ends up with the product they helped create.

This should end up with a book with dimensions, different angles with which one might approach it. That would be more like a “tarbaby” (as in the Uncle Remus stories of Br’er Rabbit).

One of my hobby horses has been the third person singular pronoun, which I will reserve for another post.