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Notes
"The Rationale of Copy-Text," SB, 3 (1950-51), 19-36; reprinted in Greg's Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1966), pp. 374-91.
The ground rules might be different—if this were what Fredson Bowers calls a "practical edition"—so that less research would be expected. But the care devoted to establishing the text on the basis of the available evidence would be no less, for this is the editor's essential task.
Informal citations of these editions throughout this essay refer to the following: The Mark Twain Papers, ed. Frederick Anderson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966- ), esp. Hannibal, Huck & Tom, ed. Walter Blair (1969), and Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. William M. Gibson (1969); The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969- ); The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, in consultation with Fredson Bowers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969- ); The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, text ed. Fredson Bowers, with Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962- ); A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells, ed. Edwin H. Cady, Don Cook, Ronald Gottesman, David J. Nordloh et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968- ); The Complete Works of Washington Irving, ed. Henry A. Pochmann et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969- ), esp. Mahomet and His Successors (1970); The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, with Richard Colles Johnson (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968- ); The Writings of William Gilmore Simms: Centennial Edition, ed. John Caldwell Guilds and James B. Meriwether (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969- ). In addition, the following are referred to allusively throughout: The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966- ); The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61); The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960- ); The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, ed. W. B. Coley, Fredson Bowers, et al. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967- ), esp. Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (1967).
Standard brief descriptions of this kind of apparatus appear in two essays by Fredson Bowers: "Textual Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (1963; rev. ed., 1970), esp. pp. 53-54; and "Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," SB, 17 (1964), esp. 227-28. See also Statement of Editorial Principles: A Working Manual for Editing Nineteenth Century American Texts (CEAA, 1967), pp. 9-10. During the same years there have, of course, been proponents of other approaches to editing and to apparatus. Among the best known are Edmund Wilson (represented by his essays in the New York Review of Books on 26 Sept. and 10 Oct. 1968, reprinted the same year in pamphlet form as The Fruits of the MLA) and F. W. Bateson (represented by his editorial plan for "Longman's Annotated English Poets" and reflected in his letter in the TLS on 1 Jan. 1971, pp. 14-15). Some discussion of Wilson's views can be found in Professional Standards and American Editions: A Response to Edmund Wilson (MLA, 1969) and of Bateson's in Thomas Clayton's letter in the TLS on 18 Dec. 1970, p. 1493.
The term "practical edition" is used here in the sense established by Fredson Bowers in "Practical Texts and Definitive Editions," in Two Lectures on Editing (1969), pp. 21-70. Further comment on the relation between definitive editions and widely disseminated reading editions appears in his "The New Look in Editing," South Atlantic Bulletin, 35 (1970), 3-10.
Encouraging such reproduction does not imply that only one reliable text of a work can exist. Obviously more than one text can be prepared following sound scholarly procedures, for there may legitimately be differences of opinion about certain emendations which rest on critical evaluation. (For discussion of this point, see G. T. Tanselle, "Textual Study and Literary Judgment," PBSA, 2nd Quarter 1971.) The point is that a practical edition should embody some reliable text, and, if such a text exists, the publisher of a practical edition should be encouraged to lease it rather than reprint, with no rationale, whatever previous text comes most readily to hand.
Some works of this kind may be of such importance that they will be frequently quoted; in these cases it may be more convenient to have a clear text (with variant readings recorded at the end), even at the sacrifice of the basic texture of the original. This sort of decision, involving a weighing of what is gained against what is lost, has to be made separately for each individual case. For further comment on this problem, see G. T. Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," forthcoming in Bibliographia.
I use the term "finished piece of writing" rather than "literary work" in order to include historical, technical, and scientific writings or any other work completed for publication or of a type usually intended for publication.
Another use of symbols in the text, convenient in certain situations in practical editions, is to draw the student's attention to important revised passages. In the Signet Typee (ed. Harrison Hayford, 1964), passages which Melville deleted in the revised American edition of 1846 are enclosed in square brackets, and those which he revised are both bracketed and numbered, with the revised wording given at the end of the volume according to the reference numbers.
"Old-Spelling Editions of Dramatic Texts," in Studies in Honor of T. W. Baldwin, ed. D. C. Allen (1958), p. 14.
The question takes a slightly different form for practical editions, since it may be felt that a classroom edition with little apparatus except explanatory notes should offer those notes as easily accessible footnotes. It is perhaps true that more students will read them as footnotes, but the price paid for this attention is a high one: not simply the distraction from the text (which is after all more important for the students to read), but the cumulative psychological effect of always (or nearly always) encountering classic works encased in an obtrusive editorial framework which sets them apart from other books read outside of class. Sometimes it is objected that references to line numbers are awkward and inconvenient when side-numbers counting the lines do not appear on the text pages. Side-numbers have been so widely used in connection with poetry that they probably constitute little distraction there (and thus do not prevent a poetic text from being "clear"); but their presence on a page of prose remains an intrusion and lends the page a "textbook" air. The psychological advantages of clear text, therefore, can be said to compensate for the minor inconvenience of having to count lines.
The use of parallel texts is often a more sensible way of exhibiting complicated revisions than to present one established text with the revisions recorded in apparatus; besides, some complex revisions result in what amounts to a different work, so that both forms of the work deserve to be presented as texts in their own right. Placing two texts in parallel columns or on facing pages is in itself a kind of apparatus; but, except for that, the comments made here about the texts of other editions would also apply to the individual texts of a parallel-text edition.
Indeed, sometimes the apparatus appended to a text is more important to scholars than the text itself, since, if it is well done, it provides the evidence on which other editions can be constructed by editors who do not agree with the interpretation of the evidence represented in that particular edition. A good example of an apparatus presented as a piece of research in its own right is Matthew J. Bruccoli's "Material for a Centenary Edition of Tender is the Night," SB, 17 (1964), 177-93.
Even a facsimile or a diplomatic edition of one particular impression of a work or one particular copy of an impression is based on a decision to present a given text and cannot be approached with the attitude that "it makes very little difference what text is printed in extenso."
Since the basic goal of an edition is to establish a text rather than to present an apparatus, the effect which the text makes would apparently—if it comes to a choice—be given somewhat more weight than the convenience with which the apparatus can be located.
Both because one knows less readily where to turn to find the apparatus and because comparative study involving several works requires more extensive page-turning. In addition, the editor may have practical reasons for preferring a single block of apparatus at the end, since it enables him to key all his apparatus to page proof at one time. If sections of apparatus are scattered through a volume, the process is inevitably less efficient; for if the editor gets galleys first, he must wait to key the apparatus for his second text until the apparatus for his first has been made into pages, so that the pagination of the second text is known, and so on through the volume; and if the editor receives pages directly, then the apparatus must be set up with blank references ("00.00") and all the figures later altered.
Considerations of the ease with which individual texts and apparatus can be reproduced photographically have little relevance here, for even when the apparatus immediately follows the work the pagination would be appropriate for separate issue only for the first work in the volume; and when pagination must be altered in any case, there would be no additional problem in taking the apparatus from the end of the volume and altering its page numbers also. A real problem might arise, of course, if the apparatus for a given work were not presented as a unit and if apparatus pertaining to other works appeared on some of the same pages; but there is no reason why apparatus at the end of a volume cannot be so arranged as to avoid this problem. (See the following paragraph and footnote 18.)
Some extra space is required, of course, for the additional headings which would be needed. Further space would generally be used if one always began the section for a given work on a new page, in an attempt to facilitate photoreproduction of an individual text with its apparatus (see footnote 17). But if only a few long texts were involved, little space would be wasted in this way, while for shorter texts, such as essays, stories, and poems (where more space might be wasted, since more of these works could be included in a volume), there would be less reason to accommodate photoreproduction, because less demand exists for separate reprints of individual short works. There would be little reason, in other words, for beginning the apparatus to each work on a new page except when a volume contains only two or three long works.
Bowers's Dekker employs this system, though the situation is somewhat different since the record of substantive emendations appears as footnotes. It is also used by Matthew J. Bruccoli in "Material for a Centenary Edition of Tender is the Night," SB, 17 (1964), 177-93, but again there are special circumstances since here the apparatus is presented independently of the text. And the Virginia Crane edition uses the "stet" system even though the list of emendations follows the textual notes.
Still another arrangement is employed in the first volume of the Simms edition, where the list of emendations and the textual notes are merged: that is, whenever a reading requires comment, the comment is inserted at the appropriate point in the list of emendations. The advantage, of course, is a reduction in the number of separate sections of apparatus, so that the reader is involved in less cross reference between sections. But, as usually happens when notes are tied to a list of emendations, some entries for unemended readings have to be included in the list. Furthermore, there is the danger that the insertion of blocks of discursive material into the list will make the list less easy to follow; in the case of the first Simms volume, the number of notes is small enough that this difficulty does not arise to any significant extent, but it remains a possibility when there is a considerable number of notes—and when the number is small, the notes may actually prove less readily accessible if imbedded in a list. Finally, difficulties of design in joining paragraphs and lists (as when lengthy notes must be accommodated to a double-column page designed primarily for listed items) provide an additional argument against using this system under ordinary circumstances.
The Cambridge Dekker and Beaumont-Fletcher editions also place the textual notes immediately after the text, but in effect these notes follow the substantive emendations, since the substantive emendations are recorded in footnotes on text pages.
The positions of various other special lists which may be required are commented on below, at the points where these lists are discussed.
Though incidentally it does list the substantive ones, since each entry has to be keyed to the reading which appears in the edited text.
In the Dewey edition, both a textual introduction and a historical introduction precede the text; but the pages on which they appear are numbered with small roman numerals, and this sequence of pagination is resumed at the back of the volume for the remainder of the apparatus. This arrangement thus makes it simple, in other printings or photographically reproduced sub-editions, to bring all the editorial matter together.
In the Wesleyan Fielding, though the textual apparatus is at the end of the volume, the explanatory notes are placed at the bottom of the text pages (keyed to footnote numbers in the text).
McKerrow was clearly aware of this feeling and admits that compression was his principal consideration: "I may say here that the conventions, which at first sight may appear somewhat complicated and even perverse, have only been adopted after careful thought and experiment, and actually do—at least in my deliberate opinion—make it possible to give all necessary facts in the minimum of space" (p. 77).
In both cases, however, some of the symbols do not follow the same system. In The Scarlet Letter, the first two editions are designated not by roman numerals but by "18501" and "18502"; and in Their Wedding Journey the serial publications are referred to as "S1" and "S2" (chronologically S1 would precede A, and S2 would follow C). Both editions use the mnemonic symbol "MS" for manuscript texts, and the Hawthorne uses "E" to distinguish English editions. In the Wesleyan Joseph Andrews, the five editions published during Fielding's lifetime are designated by simple arabic numerals, 1 through 5.
The system referred to in Mahomet, p. 584, note 17, as the standard system for the Irving edition uses such symbols as "1A1, "1A2," etc. It is difficult to decide whether the mnemonic value of these symbols is greater than that of symbols incorporating references to years; but under most circumstances of any complexity, symbols which employ the last two digits of the year (instead of the second figure here) and initials of publishers (when more than one publisher in a given country is involved) are probably easier to remember.
Of course, if a variant in punctuation were not involved, the punctuation would not be included in the reading at all; but the fact that it is included does not rule out the possibility that a spelling variant also exists at this point.
As stated above, editions of manuscript material which attempt to show stages of composition may require more elaborate sets of symbols (including perhaps angle brackets for canceled matter and vertical arrows for insertions, both of which have been fairly widely used); but the general principles for evaluating symbols outlined here would still apply. (Useful examples of symbols for editing manuscripts are found in the Hayford and Sealts Billy Budd and in the Emerson and the Irving journals.) It should be noted that complicated alterations in a manuscript can also be set forth in verbal descriptions, without any symbols at all, as in the Ohio State House of the Seven Gables and in the California Hannibal, Huck & Tom and Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. Fredson Bowers, in his review of the New York Public Library edition of Walt Whitman's Blue Book (ed. Arthur Golden), makes some comments on the relative merits of the two approaches and finds Golden's method an uneconomical mixture of the two—see JEGP, 68 (1969), 316-20.
A sensible convention which has become well established is to use periods to separate the elements of these reference numbers (e.g., "240.17" or "III.ii.75"). All references in the apparatus should obviously be to the edited text (though in the textual essay a discussion of type damage or defective inking in an early edition might well involve page-line references to that edition).
A space, for example, would suffice; or, as in the Howells edition, the reading itself need not be cited, since the discussion can be constructed so as to make clear what word or words in the cited line are in question.
It might not literally waste a particular reader's time if a given fact, though easily ascertainable in the dictionary, were not already known to him. But an editor cannot pitch his annotation at his text's least informed reader, even if he could discover who that is; some minimum level must be recognized, and it seems reasonable to say that spellings or usages readily discoverable in standard dictionaries fall below that level. (Explanatory, as opposed to textual, annotation is of course a different matter; in an explanatory note it may well be useful to have a brief identification of a historical figure, even though he is listed in the basic biographical reference works. The essential difference is that historical allusions, however numerous, are manageable in number and affect one's understanding of the meaning of the text, whereas the kind of textual notes ruled out here might logically involve half or more of the individual words of a text and by definition would not raise such special problems as interpretation or meaning.)
As opposed to those which may be classed, for one reason or another, as nontextual—about which more is said below.
Often each of these entries is placed on a separate line, but sometimes, to save space, they are run on in paragraph form (a form which makes individual entries somewhat less easy to locate).
Nontextual changes—those affecting the design of the document embodying the copy-text but not the text itself—may of course be made silently. But to make textual changes silently, even though the categories of such changes are announced and discussed in the textual essay, is to deny the principle that it is risky to allow the absence of a positive designation to be significant (cf. the comments on the caret above). Thus, in the Melville example, merely informing the reader that "-our" spellings are changed to "-or" does not allow him to reconstruct the copy-text with the certainty he would have if he could follow an actual list of changes; for he could not be sure that every "-or" word in the edited text was originally "-our," whereas with a list he would know explicitly just where the changes were made. Furthermore, the specific instances of any type of textual alteration, however trivial they may seem, may be of particular concern to some linguistic, literary, or historical scholar, and the burden of locating these instances should not be placed on the user of the text but is rather the editor's responsibility.
The same principle is followed in the Ohio State Fanshawe and the California Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, where a number of groupings of identical changes in accidentals are made; here, however, the references are cited in paragraph form in the list of emendations at the point of first occurrence of each type. To some extent this arrangement disrupts the smooth sequential flow of the list of emendations and makes it somewhat less easy to follow; but there is no doubt that it is an advantage to the reader to have these groups of identical emendations brought together somewhere.
Only if the source of the emendation were the editor himself or the last of the collated editions could the reader know that no additional information would be found in the historical collation.
In the Howells edition, when editions later than the one from which an emendation is taken agree with that edition, the complete history is implied in the entry. But when a later edition reverts to the reading of the copy-text, that further history is not offered in the emendations list. See footnote 66.
Of course, editors of facsimile or diplomatic editions are necessarily concerned with formal and typographical matters and must take them into account.
Nontextual details often play a great role in the bibliographical analysis which leads to the establishment of the text (as when wrong-font types allow a bibliographer to learn something about the timing of the distribution of type from preceding formes or about the order of formes through the press), but they are nevertheless not a part of the text.
With the exception that, when all variants are manifestly incorrect and their order is indeterminate (as in the example cited in footnote 48), designating only one of them as the copy-text reading becomes a pointless exercise. (In the case of a manuscript copy-text, of course, alternative uncanceled readings may well exist at individual points.)
Thus Bowers, in the general textual introduction to the Cambridge Beaumont and Fletcher, defines the copy-texts as embodying the readings of corrected formes: "The normal assumption is that the present edited text reproduces the corrected readings when press-variation is present if no contrary record is made" (I,xix).
Since a photographic reproduction of a single copy is often used as printer's copy for a critical edition, it follows that not every textual alteration marked on that copy is an emendation in the copy-text, for some may bring the printer's copy into conformity with the copy-text.
Some further discussion of this point appears in G. T. Tanselle, "The Use of Type Damage as Evidence in Bibliographical Description," Library, 5th ser., 23 (1968), esp. 347-48.
When neither form is correct, as in "t obelieve"/"tobelieve," it makes little difference which is considered the copy-text form, since an emendation is required in either case; in such instances, especially when the order of the variants is not clear, there is no point in choosing among incorrect forms, and both readings might as well be listed as the rejected copy-text readings.
Similarly, punctuation following (or preceding) a word need not be cited when only the word, and not the punctuation, is at issue.
William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969).
Editorial comments of this kind should of course be enclosed in square brackets to show that they are not actual readings; italicizing them is usually not sufficient, since italic words could appear in the text.
In other words, the letters do not stand for general stages of revision or alteration but refer only to the sequence at a given point. Thus there is no reason to suppose that one reading labeled "A55b" occurred at the same time or in the same process of revision as another with the same label; all that the symbol implies is that these are the second readings at each of these points.
In the Ohio State edition of The Scarlet Letter and in his paper before the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (cited in its 1964 published form in footnote 4 above).
And obviously, if the reader is accurately to reconstruct the copy-text from the critical text, he must have this information for interpreting the critical text.
If a possible compound coincidentally hyphenated at the end of a line in both the copy-text and the critical text is not recorded in a separate list, then it would appear in both these lists, and to that extent words involving editorial decisions might appear in the critical-text list. But their presence there has nothing to do with the fact that their established forms result from editorial decisions; they are there only because they are hyphenated at the ends of lines in the critical text. The fact that editorial decisions are involved can be learned only by noting the reappearance of the same words in the copy-text list.
Of course, an editor could insist that the lines of the text be reset until no hyphen which should be retained in quotation fell at the end of a line; in practice, this approach is often prohibitively expensive and, in some cases, virtually impossible of achievement.
And if the editor feels that it is of some help to the reader to have such words noted, a symbol can be placed beside those words which appear in both lists. (The Melville edition uses a dagger for this purpose.)
And emphasizing this division helps to make clear—as removing the critical-text list to another location would make still clearer—why some words turn up in two lists: since the critical-text list has nothing to do with editorial decisions, any word in it which in fact results from an editorial decision must naturally be found also in one of the two lists which record editorial decisions—the list of emendations or the copy-text hyphenation list.
It should be clear that the opposite possibility (employed in the first volume of the Simms edition)—that is, recording only those instances of possible compounds hyphenated at line-ends in the critical text which should be transcribed as single unhyphenated words—leaves ambiguities unresolved, for the reader still has to distinguish between purely compositorial hyphens, dividing unhyphenated words at line-ends, and the hyphens which should in fact be retained. (Of course, listing every line-end hyphen which should be eliminated in transcription—the only way to make this approach unambiguous—would be foolishly inefficient, since the majority of line-end hyphens in any printed work normally fall into this category, and the list would be extended inordinately.)
Of course, what remains is actually made up of two categories: possible compounds which, by editorial decision, should not contain hyphens, and words which are not possible compounds and which naturally do not contain hyphens.
Because the functions of these lists are not always grasped at first by the general reader, it is important that the headnote to each list not make the lists sound more complicated than they are. For the copy-text list, nothing more is needed than a statement of this kind: "The following are the editorially established forms of possible compounds which were hyphenated at the ends of lines in the copy-text." And for the critical-text list: "In quotations from the present edition, no line-end hyphens are to be retained except the following."
The simplest form is merely to list, following the appropriate page-line number, the word in its established form. Since the place where line-end division occurred is obvious in most cases, there is usually no need to mark it with a vertical line. Of course, when the point of division is not obvious—as in a compound with three elements and two hyphens—a vertical line can be used; but even then the vertical line is useful only in the copy-text list, not in the critical-text list. (The Dewey edition, in the critical-text list, gives the word first as a lemma, showing the line-ending with a vertical stroke, and then the established hyphenated form; such repetition does not make the function of the list clearer and indeed would seem to add a needless complication.) Furthermore, in the critical-text list, where every page-line citation would technically contain two line numbers (since each cited word runs over a line-end in the critical text, to which all citations are keyed), the awkwardness of the double-line reference serves no real purpose, and each page-line citation might as well refer simply to the line on which the word begins.
Sometimes certain of these entries do in fact provide histories of the readings involved, but that is not their primary function.
Certain other editions which, because of their wide popularity or impressive scholarship, have been influential in the history and study of the text may also be included in the historical collation, even though the variant readings present in them can carry no authorial sanction; indeed, editions of Elizabethan works often include practically every previous edition in their historical collations and thus provide the complete history of the treatment of the text with regard to substantives.
This plan is followed in the Howells edition (note the entries in Their Wedding Journey for 102.28 or in Literary Friends and Acquaintance for 223.23). As a result of the overlapping function of the two lists under this plan, the reader cannot know, when looking at the list of emendations, whether or not any given substantive entry contains the complete history of the variants at that point and must turn to the list of rejected substantives to see if any additional history is recorded there.
However, impressions of an edition need not be specified when there are no variants in them. Thus if "A" stands for the only American edition, that symbol alone could signify all the collated impressions of the American edition. But if a variant first shows up in, say, "A1847" (or "A47"), its history will be represented more clearly by "A47-76" than by defining "A47" to include all subsequent collated impressions. The use of inclusive notation, of course, does not result in the appearance of every siglum in each entry, but, when the symbols include mnemonic allusions to years or sequences, the grouping which would include any given siglum is obvious. For convenient reference, a list of all collated editions (or impressions) with their sigla should be included in the headnote to the historical collation (as well as in the headnote to any other sections in which the sigla are used).
A related symbol of McKerrow's, the plus-and-minus sign (±), is put to good use in Bowers's Dekker to stand for a general but not exact agreement among several editions, where the minor variations are irrelevant to the main fact which the entry is recording The same method could be applied to the specification of individual editions by enclosing in parentheses those sigla which refer to editions containing the slightly variant readings. (Such a practice would conform to McKerrow's use of parentheses, referred to above, to indicate "a reading which is not identical with one which is given but which is substantially the same in meaning or intention so far as the purpose of the note is concerned" [p. 82].) Sometimes earlier editions went too far in multiplying symbols of this sort: in the opening volume of the Variorum Shakespeare (1874), for example, Furness employs "&c," "et cet.," and "the rest" to stand for different groups of editions. Another symbol relevant to the matter of inclusive notation is the dollar sign, which has been borrowed from descriptive bibliography and introduced into textual apparatus by Bowers in the fifth volume of the Crane edition; it is used there to mean "all" or "every" when attached to symbols which subsume a number of documents (such as "N," the syndicated newspaper texts of a given work). The symbol is useful in "$N" to emphasize the fact that all the examined N texts agree and "$N (—N4)" to reinforce the statement that all but one agree; but since "N" is already a generic symbol, defined as all the examined newspaper texts, the dollar sign is essentially a device for adding emphasis rather than for condensing the statement.
Even in such a case, a variant at a point of emendation is somewhat awkward, since the reading in the edited text must be cited as the key for the entry, and it is different in these instances from the first-column (copy-text) reading.
It would be highly undesirable to have a situation in which a reading from a third edition had to be placed in a third column, even though it agreed with the reading in one of the other two editions; such an arrangement would make it more difficult for the reader to note agreements among editions and would open up more possibilities for typographical errors in the list.
Sigla in these lists would refer to particular copies of books, not just to particular impressions.
These lists do not record the complete history of the variants listed, for their function is only to note that the variants were present in a particular edition and are not adopted in the critical text. (Strictly speaking, therefore, no sigla at all would be required in such lists.)
When only a brief manuscript fragment survives, it can be treated either in a separate list (as "The Ohio State University Leaf" in The Blithedale Romance) or in a complete transcription with accompanying apparatus (as in the Northwestern-Newberry Typee, Mardi, and White-Jacket).
Placing all such lists immediately after the basic historical collation helps to make clear that they are parts of the historical record, appendixes in a sense to the historical collation. (The attempt to make the list of emendations serve as a partial historical collation is not an extension of the principle that certain categories within the historical collation can be conveniently separated, for it mixes the functions of the lists; all these special supplementary lists are purely historical in function.) Sometimes certain of these lists—especially those dealing with variants within an impression—are placed first in the apparatus, since they often deal with material which chronologically precedes that taken up in other lists; but chronology is not the general basis for the organization of the apparatus as a whole, and readers can probably find their way around in an extensive apparatus more easily if the arrangement is based on the distinct functions of the several lists.
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