Re: OT: extracting a public-domain part from an anthology
> For texts which date *after* the advent of printing, variant editions
> are quite rare, and there is really no such thing as a "critical
> text"--every text is really pretty identical. (However, it is
> occasionally done to "update" the punctuation, spelling [or worse, the
> grammar] of an old text, which certainly is copyrightable.)
The first printed books started to appear in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. And yet, all the way up to the end of the
eighteenth century, we find many variations of the classics. This
comes from two main sources: authors relied on others to do printing.
Often, the printers would make mistakes and in-house style and
shortcuts were often applied even at the highest quality printers.
This is further complicated by original undated manuscripts: was the
manuscript a draft? was it modified after the final edition?
Furthermore, authors often revised their work and would print a new
additional versions later in life: just consider Pope's _Essay on
Man_. Many of the documents undated and determining the author's
final intentions is non-trivial. Consider William Blake: he was
incredibly meticulous in both his writing and engraving and many
variations of his work abound.
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