A Guide to Documentary Editing, 3d edition

For more than twenty years, A Guide to Documentary Editing has proven an invaluable tool for scholarly editors, editors-in-training, readers of documentary editions, and other students of American history and literature. This new, extensively revised edition of the Guide arrives in the midst of great change in the field. In addition to exploring fully the increasingly central role electronic technology plays in the editing process, this edition provides the most current treatment of the craft’s fundamental issues. These include locating and collecting sources, transcribing source texts, conventions of textual treatment, dealing with nontextual elements, and preparing editions for publishers. The documentary-editing environment is more vibrant than ever, and the authors draw on this wealth of activity to include numerous examples of the Guide’s principles in practice.

The most innovative aspect of this latest edition of the Guide is a new digital component. Users may access the entire contents online through a dedicated Web site available exclusively to purchasers of the print edition. In addition to offering the convenience of easy online access, this Web edition will include hyperlinks to relevant literature and will act as an archive for material from earlier editions. Most important, it will be periodically revised and updated, to ensure a Guide that is always current with best practice.

Each edition of the Guide has become the standard text for scholarly editors, whether their focus is correspondence, journals, diaries, financial records, professional papers, or unpublished manuscripts. This print/digital edition presents this essential guide in its most dynamic and useful form yet.

Published in association with the Association for Documentary Editing

University of Virginia Press

First published in 1987 and widely acclaimed, A Guide to Documentary Editing is now available in a new and completely revised edition. Drawing on the experience of dozens of editorial projects, the author details every step of the editing process as now practiced in the electronic information age -- planning a project, organizing materials, evaluating and transcribing texts, applying textual and editorial conventions, and preparing the edition for the publisher. The author even makes cautious predictions about future forms of electronic documentary publication: CD-ROMs, locally available text bases, and Internet sites. In addition, the author brings up to date her survey of literature in areas such as document selection, annotation, and non-verbal sources. Editors of such historical and literary documents as correspondence, journals, diaries, financial records, professional papers, and unpublished manuscripts will find this book an indispensable companion.

Praise for the first edition: "I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about the work of documentary editors, thinking about initiating a documentary editing project, or using or thinking of using the fruits of documentary projects. It is a detailed, basic, generally descriptive but sometimes prescriptive how-to guide for the preparation of historical and literary manuscripts." -- Isis

Booknews

New edition of a guide which details every step of the editing process as practiced in the electronic information age<-->planning a project, organizing materials, evaluating and transcribing texts, applying textual and editorial conventions, and preparing the edition for the publisher. The author also comments on new forms of electronic documentary publication such as CD-ROMs, locally available text bases, and internet sites, and she updates the guide's survey of literature including document selection, annotation, and nonverbal sources. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Mary-Jo Kline is curator, Special Collections, at the John Hay Library, Brown University.