The Frustration with Poor Editions

Most of you know me as a musician. What a lot of you may not know is that I also hold a degree in English and have been a passionate reader most of my life. For the past few years, I have set annual reading goals and try to include at least one "major" work from the standard cannon in my reading. This year, I decided to tackle George Eliot's Middlemarch. (You can read my thoughts about the novel in this post on Reading for Me.)


When I went to the bookstore to pick up the first of my summer selections, I noticed an enormous display of the Barnes & Noble Classic editions and decided to give them a try. After all, they covered many of the classics and offered them at a decent price. How tough would it be to offer a decent reading edition of Middlemarch anyway?


That's one mistake I will never make again. This reading experience was horrible because of the poor quality of the edition. Barnes & Noble seemed to want to offer an edition with scholarly notes, but they were both cumbersome and awkward. More frustrating than the overall layout of the novel were the obvious errors that were present throughout the work. I found myself wondering repeatedly if an editorial team even bothered to read the proofs once the type was set. Misspelled words littered the pages. Awkward errors in pronoun usage continually occurred. Phrases were repeated throughout a passage. At first I thought this was the result of an inept editor-at-large who oversaw a small portion of the edition. I quickly realized this was not the case as I struggled with these errors for over 800 pages. There was no obvious logic to the recurring errors.....and no clear presence of an editorial staff at all.


The edition was cheap. That's the only positive thing I can say about it. Truthfully, the Barnes & Noble Classic edition made a challenging novel much more difficult to read than was actually necessary. When I first began reading Middlemarch, I was making marginal notations in the hope that I would return to the work again in the future. I was enthralled by Eliot's writing and will certainly read it again, but not using this edition. This copy will not be finding a treasured place on my bookshelf; instead, this worthless paperback only has a future in the local landfill.