Darcy Cullen, Ed.: Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text

DARCY CULLEN, ED. Editors, Scholars, and Social Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. xx + 281 pp. Darcy Cullen, an experienced editor University of British Columbia Press, has assembled a collection of essays examine different parts of academic book publishing process, contributors being a mixture of academics and professional editors and designers. The theoretical framework is of academic book as a product of social collaboration, in many people other than author involved in creation of a book's finished authority. This is not an especially challenging concept to those of us who have worked as academic editors, but it is useful to have perspective of production editor, copy-editor, and book designer set alongside of authors, especially a time of technological change. The broad distinction made by Peter Shillingsburg between academic and scholarly editing, obvious enough when set forth, is particularly interesting. The former, in which publisher's editor and copy-editor play a prominent part, is typically concerned with elimination of variation and inconsistency (say when producing an academic monograph), aim being creation of a single accurate text in best form. The latter, where an academic will have major role, is in contrast usually intended to highlight variation and uncertainty, because by its nature it often deals with multiple texts in a historical context. The result is a much more complex textual product. Shillingsburg brings out tension can exist between these different approaches to editing. Editors, Scholars, and Social Text is reviewed here because two of essays deal with electronic editions, and one of these (Yuri Cowan, Reading Material Bibliography and Digital Editions) takes Early English Text Society as a starting point. Cowan sees a parallel between our present historical moment, with its enthusiasm for possibilities of digitization, and early years of EETS, when F. J. Furnivall began to exercise his tireless genius for social organizing and recruited both amateur and professional scholars, working cooperatively at a feverish pace to put as much material as possible before public eye (226-227). EETS and similar enterprises, he writes, represent in a print medium kind of mushrooming interest in editing and textual recovery electronic medium has sparked. They, too, sought to fill gaps in historical record, especially those to do with works had been neglected. And, as with digitization projects, results variously successful, partly (in EETS's case) because of physical constraints imposed by print medium. These nineteenth-century editors, Cowan continues, aware of the daunting material archive had suddenly opened up, and realized editing was an ongoing process. Knee-deep in sociology of texts, they were less in awe of authority of scholarly print edition than we are (234). Their aim was to make texts accessible rather than to perfect them. These observations feed into one of Cowans broader themes, modern scholars work on (multi-version) digital editions not so much editing as creating archives. In correspondence with Henry Bradshaw, Librarian of Cambridge University, who had earlier impressed on Furnivall need for some of his people to edit books, latter rather disingenuously wrote 'you're man to edit Chaucer, if only you will. I'm man to print texts' (228). It is possible, writes Cowan, that modern digital editors more like Furnivall than like Bradshaw (229). The editor of Editors, Scholars, and Social Text, Darcy Cullen, contributes final essay in volume, in which she surveys present field of electronic publishing, contrasting static PDF e-books with potential and problems of navigable, intertextual web books. …

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