In the preface of the new 3rd edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008), David G. Nicholls, the chief compiler, refuses explicitly to claim authorship or editorship for the new edition: “I decided that the new edition should be considered a product of corporate authorship” (xxiii). The 3rd edition is a revision of the 2nd, which Nicholls credits to Joseph Gibaldi. The second edition was based on the 1st edition, a collaboration between Gibaldi and Walter S. Achtert (xxiii).

The publisher’s book designers respect Nicholls’s decision, and the title page, the spine, and the wrapper make no statement about authorship. The CIP, however, cites the 3rd edition as a “Rev. ed.” of Joseph Gibaldi’s 2nd edition. WorldCat and thus library catalogs, are powerfully influenced by CIP data. So WorldCat is having nothing of this corporate authorship nonsense. See http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/191090459 or page image below.

To librarians at least, the Romantic idea of authorship is indispensable: The author of the third edition is Joseph Gibaldi. Case closed. The early reviewers in literary journals, who must read the book, notice Nicholls’s insistence on corporate authorship. See Clawson in College Literature and Landeira in Rocky Mountain Review. In two or three years, as this revision filters out to all of the handbooks and style guides, I wonder what will happen. Will users of electronic citation software, who may rely on WorldCat, believe in what the electronic record tells them, that the 3rd edition of the MLA Style Manual participates still in Romantic authorship?

One of the pleasure books for the summer is John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions. The reading is in part connected to personal background–of which I have a bit to say–and intellectual.

The background of the mind is more important: a scholar and friend compared Fredson Bowers’s Principles of Descriptive Bibliography with Newman’s Apologia as a great work of intellectual achievement. Like Newman does for an intellectual life, to find the thread of conscience that unites his Catholic present and his Anglican past, Bowers does for books as material objects, to find the thread of authorizing intention (publishers’ and authors’) that allow him to quantify a relationship among a unique instances of sets of folded and bound sheets. Those are my words, not those of the scholar and friend.

The background of the heart may be relevant too. I was raised as a secular Roman Catholic. I attended weekly Mass but not the local Catholic school and took classes in catechism from lay teachers, until confirmation. My secular bent was acquired much like Richard Rodriquez’s in Hunger of Memory, during the course of a university education. My father an atheist instilled an incredulity toward religion in such matters as the Biblical story of creation, but I maintained religious belief despite the discomfort with inconsistency. The strongest influence on the progression from belief to atheism came from two classes in Christian theology at a Lutheran college. The writings of theologian Paul Tillich taught me to see doubt and hope as the two parts of any considered expression of faith: for sake of consistency–and to eliminate discomfort–I discarded the hope and kept the doubt.

So to read Newman’s Apologia is to journey into a mind concerned with self-examination, against which systems of belief must bend, or break, as knowledge gained through study and through reflection alters former beliefs or positions. In defense of the Tractarian Movement, Newman argued for the effectiveness of “individuals, strongly feeling”: “No great work was ever done by a system; whereas systems rise out of individual exertions. Luther was an individual. The very faults of an individual excite attention; he loses, but his cause (if good and he powerful-minded) gains. This is the way of things; we promote truth by self-sacrifice.” (48). Newman shares the view of a less traditional visionary, William Blake, who in Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion expresses a similar view: “I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (21-22).

Against an academic’s petty cares and frustrations, such words are cooling rain. Even we who lack the genius to shape worlds of self-reflection like Newman or worlds of imagination like Blake can seek consolation in the work, even if the system that arises from the work is faulty or inadequate, the contribution to a cause other than the self makes the work worth doing.

Blake, William. Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, copy E, pl. 10. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 3 August 2009 < http://www.blakearchive.org/>.

Newman, John. Apologia pro vita sua: being a history of his religious opinions. Ed. M. J. Svaglic. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1967.

The 10-volume dictionary is the Grand Larousse Encyclopédique, and its effect on my physical being, though not my mind, is mostly in my shoulders, which still have a tinge this Saturday morning. On Thursday I carried the volumes from the Kent State University Library circulation desk to the parking lot. These 10 volumes, formerly the library’s second copy, were purchased at the low, low price of $0.50 per volume, $5.00 for the set.

Maybe my purpose is the save the university library from its folly, by purchasing every book it throws out so that I can return them when I retire. I envy Sisyphus. Perhaps they are merely to decorate my bookshelves. The spines of ten 1000-page reference works are a delight: just by the stateliness of their leather binding the bookshelves seem to rise to the status of a personal library. So I need them, I suppose, because I have the collector’s obsession for books. It’s an investment: I’ll sell them. No, I won’t. Maybe I want these books to be the envy of a professor of French that I encounter some day. Oh, I know, it’s so I can read Montaigne with greater pleasure. If every rationalization fails, I always have Lear’s: “Reason not the need….”

This article was written in mid-2007 as a proposal for a now defunct reference project. I tried to provide an overview of digital newspaper sources from a national and international perspective. Because my background is in American literature, the international perspective is not as strong. I provide links to digital projects and titles of monumental periodical research guides.

Newspapers record immediate responses to events of contemporary significance and provide detailed information about historical figures, literary works, and social trends. But the cost of making off of this information accessible in the present—preserving individual issues, binding larger sets, indexing, microfilming, digitizing, purchasing access rights to copyrighted material–has meant that much newspaper content remains inaccessible. Digital newspaper projects face many constraining factors: On what basis should content be included or excluded? Which newspapers should be made available? Should content be made available in subscription databases or in public access platforms? Should content be accessed as transcription or page images? Digital newspaper resources, whether made freely available by research institutions or published by for-profit vendors, always require those who prepare such resources to conform to legal restrictions and to judge cultural significance in order to justify investments in digitization.

The long term trend of gathering current newspaper content into databases can helpfully illuminate the types of decisions that face designers of such systems. The LexisNexis Academic database, for example, gathers content from prominent regional newspapers from the United States and combines it with content from magazines and journals. The definition of the content which is excluded from Lexis-Nexis is instructive. Inserts, classified advertisements and unique matter in alternate daily editions is not considered content at all, and is omitted. Editorial columns and feature stories may be excluded due to copyright restrictions. Another highly ambitious subscription database, Newsbank’s America’s Newspapers, provides access to three years of content from over 2000 prominent local and regional newspapers, but even its “tens of millions” of items are a small slice of the daily newspaper production in the United States. And even those items which are publicly available, access will be influenced by the news search engines from Google and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo.

Library vendors offer many subscription-based services for historical content of U.S. Newspapers. Subscription-based tools include Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers, Thomson-Gale’s 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, and ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Content in historical databases is not omitted on a category basis, but low quality reproductions from microfilm and low accuracy rates for character recognition limits content retrieval. Subscription databases for historical content offer sophisticated tools to sort results and identify matches. A commercial vendor, NewspaperArchive.com, has assembled large collections of unique content and sell subscriptions to individuals, though these vendors have less sophisticated search tools. Another commercial vendor, Paper of Record, was recently acquired by Google (2009), and Google may well become a dominant player in this field of historical newspapers as well.

The preparation of freely accessible national collections and the spread of commercial search sites for newspaper archives deserve special attention. National collections will provide great benefits to scholars, The United States National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP) and British Library Online Newspaper Archive are currently available, as is Tiden–A Nordic Digital Newspaper Library and Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845.

The contemporary emphasis on digital access builds on previous preservation efforts. Digital projects share with their antecedents an emphasis on newspapers with wide distribution, which are more carefully cataloged and preserved. Low-circulation newspapers, which may be saved in haphazard sets, are less likely to be cataloged or duplicated for preservation purposes. Printed and microfilm versions of national union catalogs and prominent library catalogs remain important resources, but their digital descendants are important online resources. Online catalogs from the Library of Congress, British Library, and the International Coalition on Newspapers provide important finding aids. Nonetheless, printed indexes remain indispensable. Specialized print bibliographies remain essential also for the study of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

User expectations for convenient access will mean that those items not digitized are less likely to be studied. Thus, project definitions are likely to have an important influence on scholarship. For example, the scope of the NDNP project is limited to “significant newspapers” from “1836 and 1922.” The opening year of coverage defines a convenient technological barrier. Type fonts before 1836 increase the cost of automatic optical character recognition. Such a technological barrier can be overcome, as the Tiden project demonstrates. The year 1922 is not technical. It is the legal boundary established in the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Works published in 1923 or after have copyright protection.

Given current digital newspaper resources, scholars interested in marginal or regional voices, small linguistic enclaves, in aggregations of large data sets, and in paper documents as material objects face the greatest challenges. But all scholars need to be aware that digital tools may obscure facts about original documents. Portions may be omitted due to legal restrictions or editorial decisions about importance, accuracy rates are defined against ideal source materials, and twentieth-century generic categories may not easily apply to nineteenth-century or earlier newspapers papers. The transcription that is the basis of the search may not be accessible to users, and the only evidence for the incorrect transcription is the absence of search results. A pressing task is to improve catalogs for access to current digital resources. Also pressing is a study that has yet to begin, that of newspaper databases themselves as tools of representation.

Databases
Please note that many of these sources are available only to members of subscribing institutions.

British Newspapers 1800-1900
http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/
19th Century U.S. Newspapers (Thomson-Gale)
http://www.gale.com/usnewspapers/about.htm
Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845
http://www.nla.gov.au/ferg/
America’s Historical Newspapers (Readex)
http://www.readex.com/readex/index.cfm?content=96
Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
http://www.il.proquest.com/products_pq/hnp/
NewspaperArchive.com
http://newspaperarchive.com<
Tiden — A Nordic Digital Newspaper Library
http://tiden.kb.se/
Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE)
http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html
ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers
http://icon.crl.edu/digitization.htm
Google News Archive
http://news.google.com/archivesearch
Lexis Nexis Academic
http://www.lexisnexis.com/academic/universe/academic/
Yahoo! Search, News.
http://news.search.yahoo.com/

Periodical Catalogs
British Library Catalogue of the Newspaper Library (1975)
British Union-Catalogue of Periodicals (1955-58, 1962)
Catalogue Collectif des Périodiques du Début du XVIIe Siècle à 1939 (1967-81)
Gesamtverzeichnis Ausländischer Zeitschriften und Serien (1959-68)
Catalogue Général des Périodiques du début du XVIIe Siècle à 1959 (1988)
Serials in Australian Libraries (1963)
Union List of Canadian Newspapers (1987)

Stephen Jay Gould in “An Earful of Joy” recalls a moment of rapture while rehearsing Berlioz’s Tuba Mirem at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. The “thunder of the timpany [....] entered the wooden risers under my feet and rose from there to suffuse my body; sound became feeling.” He continues, “I do not believe in distant phyletic memory. Yet, in an odd and purely analogical sense, I had become a fish for a moment. We (and nearly all terrestrial vertebrates) hear airborne sound through our ears; fish feel the vibration of waterborne sound through their lateral line organs. Fish, in other words, `hear’ by feeling–as I had done through a set of wooden risers with a density closer to water than to air” (96). As a former member of the brass section in a concert band, I remember when my own mortal coil has shivered from such vibrations. I thank Gould, an evolutionary biologist with a gift for analogy, for connecting that shiver to a fish’s sense of “hearing.”

Gould, Stephen J. “An Earful of Joy.” Eight Little Piggies. New York: Norton, 1994. 95-108.

In the 2-volume John P. Jewett edition, thin spaces precede the apostrophe in contractions. So one has “I[thinsp]‘ll” or “he[thinsp]‘d.” Negative contractions have the thin space before the n, so “could[thinsp]n’t” “should[thinsp]n’t etc.

But the edition has no space before an s to indicate possession. So (in chapter 1), Haley does not observe “Murray’s Grammar,” and Eliza’s son Harry takes up his “master’s stick.” (no space). In chapter 2, Mr. Harris claims to own George under the logic of slavery. He says “The man[thinsp]’s mine” (1:31). But he does not use possession. Mr. Harris uses a contraction for “man is mine.” When the thin space is present in the Jewett 2-volume edition, that form is distinguishable, by the presence of a thin space, from all possessive forms of man’s, such as when Chloe gets her “ole man’s supper” (1:38-39). When the text is modernized and that thin space is removed, the distinction between a possessive form and a contraction disappears.

In the modernized editions that I’ve looked at (Douglas, Ammons, Yellin), this distinction, which was present in the nineteenth century first book edition, has gone the way of the i/j and u/v distinction in Renaissance print. Is mis-spacing a form of a mis-spelling?

During the process of collating four early versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I have been able to identify some passages in the most commonly reprinted text of John P. Jewett’s 1852 2-volume edition that from many editorial perspectives could be considered errors. I cite four documentary sources that conceivably represent authorial preference: 1851-52 National Era newspaper (symbol NE), 1852 Jewett 2-volume edition (symbol J2V), 1852/53 Jewett one-volume paperback (JPB), and 1853 Jewett Illustrated (symbol JIL). Houghton Osgood’s New Edition (1879) is also noted. My intent is to list some of the most important examples here. This post will be devoted to chapter I.

Error 1: scrachin or screachin’
I all’ays hates these yer scrachin, screamin times. (NE 89)
I al’ays hates these yer screachin’, screamin’ times. (J2V 18)
I al’ays hates these yer screechin’, screamin’ times. (JPB 6)
I al’ays hates these yer screechin’, screamin’ times. (JIL 18)
I al’ays hates these yer screechin’, screamin’ times. (HO 6)

The first example that I consider an error in J2V, the reading closest to Stowe’s authorial manuscript is the newspaper, so the preferred reading is scrachin, screamin. I believe that scrachin is the most interesting reading because a woman whose child has been sold to a slave trader (text is from Haley’s example of previous parallels should Arthur Shelby agree to sell Eliza’s son Harry) resists with hands and nails also, not just voice.

The Jewett edition’s screachin’, screamin’ is probably a compositor’s error, caused by anticipating the subsequent word. This two words are needlessly repetitive, and the first word is misspelled. J2V twice has the correct spelling, screechin’ or screeching. See J2V 1:19 (also Haley) and 1:118 (Sam). In PB, JIL and HO, J2V screachin’ is corrected to screechin’ (JPB 6 and JIL 18). Note also that Jewett editions generally include apostrophes to indicate elided g’s in dialect. The newspaper, like the manuscript, does not.

As the authorial manuscript does not survive, I infer the greater likelihood that the earliest copy set from manuscript, the newspaper, better reflects the authorial reading. The NE reading scrachin should be noted as a possible emendation even if confined to editorial notes. Even if that proposed emendation is rejected, editors (and readers) who reject the former should consider additional occurrences of screechin’ and screeching in J2V and the correction of this form to screechin’ in JPB, JIL, and HO. The evidence is strong that screachin’ in J2V is misspelled.

Error 2: Haley folds arm

And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce. (NE 89)
And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce. (J2V 1:20)
And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce. (PB 7)
And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce. (JIL 19)
And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce. (HO 7)

The J2V reading folded his arm is less satisfactory in context than the other three contemporaneous editions, which have folded his arms. The NE reading is probably closer to manuscript, J2V is likely a compositor’s error, and the J2V reading is corrected in PB and JIL. The 1879 HO New Edition restores the J2V reading, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that J2V and HO are incorrect.

This is third in a series of six, and possibly seven, posts with the provisional title “Marking Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Typography, Race, and Textual Transmission.” See Part I: In which a space is not a space if you’d like to start at the beginning. This series includes much-revised versions of presentations at the Midwest MLA Conference (Minneapolis, 2008) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (New York, 2008). The revised version is intended as a draft for an article to be submitted to a journal. Comments are appreciated.

After some thinking, I’ve decided to remove this post from my blog. What was intended as a spur to re-thinking and revision has not functioned as I had hoped. The post feels “published.” And I’m not revisiting it with the necessary seriousness and attention that is necessary to submit a journal article. I may reconsider yet again. But I’m going to try revising with no series of posts online to distract me.

This is second in a series of six, and possibly seven, posts with the provisional title “Marking Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Typography, Race, and Textual Transmission.” See Part I: In which a space is not a space if you’d like to start at the beginning. This series includes much-revised versions of presentations at the Midwest MLA Conference (Minneapolis, 2008) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (New York, 2008). The revised version is intended as a draft for an article to be submitted to a journal. Comments are appreciated.

In the two-volume Jewett edition, volume 1, page 106, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slavecatcher Tom Loker asks Haley, the trader who purchased Uncle Tom, to provide what his partner Marks will call a retaining fee. Loker and Marks will pursue the child Harry–for Haley–and the mother Eliza for their own profit:

Note the hyphen at the end of the third line of the image. In an editorial sense, when this passage is transcribed, the hyphen is not a hyphen: it is not there. The hyphen that is not a hyphen is not there for many reasons–which this post will explore–but the real reason that the hyphen is not there, I propose, is that the hyphen represents a space that is not quite a space, in the sense that we cannot see it because of a paradigmatic blindness about typographical space. Not all scholars of literature and cultural studies are blind to typographical space in historical printing practices. A comment on Post I in this series, by William Tozier, shows that my original assumption about the blindness of other toilers in the field may have been rash. But I only recognized my own blindness to typographical space with the assistance of many works by Randall McLeod, most recently his “Gerald Hopkins and the Shapes of His Sonnets” (2004), and with the assistance of Peter Burnhill’s Type Spaces (London: Hyphen Press, 2003). But the degree to which my work departs from McLeod’s and Burnhill’s–and may be of more interest to scholars of American literature–concerns the intersection between type space, race, and stereotype during the textual transmission of Stowe’s work, a function of Modernization.

The hyphen could be “not there” in two senses. In the first sense, which is used by the Chicago Manual of Style for the preparation of manuscripts, it could be a soft hyphen, one “used merely to break a word at the end of a line.” The alternative, a hard or permanent hyphen, which “must remain no matter where the hyphenated word or term appears,” can be rejected as impossible, unless the intended word is “does-n’t [sic]” (87). A second sense in which the hyphen is “not there” is provided by the The Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE). The MLA CSE addresses cases that are neither the Chicago Manual’s soft hyphens (“signs of syllabic division used to split a word in two for easier justification”) nor hard hyphens (“signs that a compound word is to be spelled with a hyphen”). Those which fit neither category are “ambiguous,” because it is “unclear whether the word is to be spelled with or without the hyphen” (CSE 36). In a scholarly edition, the editor uses judgment to decide how the word was “intended to be spelled.” After the matter is resolved, the editor must record the emendation in the apparatus. There are two basic choices: 1) “does-n’t [sic]” is an error in which “doesn’t” was intended, 2) Or “does-n’t [sic]” is an error in which “does n’t” was intended. For an authoritative judgment, a scholarly editor consults corollary evidence, which consists, first, of other instances of the same word in this edition, and which consists, second, of the same passage in other authoritative versions of the text.

In the two-volume Jewett edition, the contraction appears 12 more times, and the first use of the word (or words) is by Aunt Chloe:

That’s straightforward. There’s a space, a somewhat thin one, between the s and the n. Trust that if I were to photoquote (the term is Randall McLeod’s) “does n’t” 12 more times the other examples would also have a space, regardless of the speaker’s race, typically a thin one but a space nonetheless. Of course, in the troubling example at the end of the line on pg. 106, we have a hyphen at the end of the line. With confidence that there is usually a space between does and n’t, we will lean toward the hyphen as an error. But if the intent is to cite this passage or prepare an edition, a more conscientious attitude may be required, especially if the caution from MLA Style Manual (2008) echoes in our head: “Accuracy of quotations is extremely important. They must reproduce the original sources exactly” (122).

Stowe had some authority over at least four other versions of the text: the manuscript, the National Era serial version (1851-52), Jewett’s one-volume paperback Edition for the Million (1852/53), Jewett’s one-volume illustrated edition (1853), and Houghton-Osgood’s New Edition (1879). This passage is not present in the surviving manuscript pages. But it does appear in three near contemporary versions on which the author may have had an influence. I’ll photoquote other examples of “does-n’t [sic]” in chronological order of appearance: the serial, which appeared before the Jewett edition; those that followed shortly, the paperback and the illustrated edition; and, for good measure though it appears 27 years later, the last edition in Stowe’s lifetime on which she was intimately involved, the New Edition:

Note: Image size is not proportional. Also, the 3rd image is from the Google facsimile of the Sampson Low edition, a printing that was prepared based on the Jewett illustrated edition plates. The fourth image is also a GoogleBooks microfilm facsimile. I will be scanning the texts for updates to this post.

If we reach a conclusion based on the predominant practice of Jewett’s two-volume edition, there should have been a space. But these examples are also typical of their respective publication form. The National Era practice for contractions was to have no space. But because we have three editions from Jewett, and I’ve checked multiple examples in all three texts, we can make a further surmise. The presence or absence of space in contractions is a matter of design. For the short paperback edition, a trim 166 pages, spaces are generally present in contractions, as they are in the two-volume edition. For the fat illustrated edition with 568 pages, in many copies gilt-edged, with ample margins and copious engravings, the design of typography included omitting spaces in contractions. If Jewett as a publisher had a practice–and I think we can reasonably infer that it did–the act of designing the edition included deciding whether contractions should have a space. The 1879 Houghton-Osgood may carry lesser authority for space in typography, but it at least seems true that a space was thought present, from which we can infer, provisionally, either that the Houghton-Osgood compositor followed the 1852 two-volume copy or followed the design, in which, again, the presence or absence of space in contractions was a matter of concern.

Unfortunately, neither multiple editions nor the publisher’s practice offers any clarity on our original question, the presence of that curious hyphen in “does-n’t [sic].” The paperback edition’s generous typographical space conflicts with its strict economy in other matters: cramped margins, no illustrations, cheap paper. And though the illustrated edition was lavished with larger type, the designer chose to close up the space in contractions. So a transcriber of this text, or an editor who prepares a new edition, must make a surmise about this curious example. This is my surmise. When the compositor for the two-volume Jewett edition decided to place the hyphen at the end of the line, he probably struggled against competing influences. His copy, probably Stowe’s manuscript but possibly a marked up printing of the National Era newspaper, lacked a space before the comma. But the compositor’s instinct to follow copy contrasted with the book’s design, which insisted that contractions have a thin space between the two halves of the contraction. At the end of this line, he compromised awkwardly between the two practices: he inserted a hyphen that stands for a thin space.

That is, in the case of “does-n’t [sic]” at line end, a particular case that finds theoretical justification in the works of Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie, the hyphen represents a space that is not quite a space. Why one generic space is not equivalent to another will be the subject of Part III in this series of this post. This surmise can only be supported if our concept of typographical space is both historically sensitive and theoretically sound. While I aim to provide such a background, I must address our own era of computer typesetting, in which we have we have become accustomed to flexible spacing, wherein space as definition of width or space as substitute for line end is a matter of bewildering possibilities. Part III in this series of posts, “In which a hyphen is not a space,” will explore subtle variations in typographical space, from the perspective both of historical printing practices (hand-set type) and digital reproduction (ASCII, TeX, and Unicode). And we’ll turn in Part IV of this series to Modernist attitudes toward typography.

See Part III: In which a hyphen is not a space.

Works Cited

Burnhill, Peter. Type Spaces. London: Hyphen Press, 2003. Print.

Committee on Scholarly Editions. “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions.” Electronic Textual Editing. Eds. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, et al. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. Print.

McLeod, Randall. Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies Eds. Raimonda Modiano et al. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004, 177-297. Print.

Modern Language Association. MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 3rd ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Print.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. 2 Vols. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852. Internet Archive. Web.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. National Era. 5 June 1851 — 1 April 1852. Ed. Wesley Raabe. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Web

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. Illustrated. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853. GoogleBooks. [published also by Sampson Low]. Web.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. 1 Vol. Pbk. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852-53. Print.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. Boston: Houghton-Osgood, 1879. Web.

University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 87. Print.

This is first in a series of six, and possibly seven, posts with the provisional title “Marking Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Typography, Race, and Textual Transmission.” This series includes much-revised versions of presentations at the Midwest MLA Conference (Minneapolis, 2008) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (New York, 2008).

After some thinking, I’ve decided to remove this post from my blog. What was intended as a spur to re-thinking and revision has not functioned as I had hoped. The post feels “published.” And I’m not revisiting it with the necessary seriousness and attention that is necessary to submit a journal article. I may reconsider yet again. But I’m going to try revising with no series of posts online to distract me.