The Reading Room

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8:31 AM

@Randal'Thor The web site ebooks.adelaide.edu.au, which served the texts of public-domain books, closed in early 2020. We have about 30 posts with links to the site: it would be nice to replace these links with working links. In most cases we can substitute another repository of public domain texts, for example gutenberg.org, but if that fails we can use web.archive.org.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

10:36 AM

Q: What play are these lines a reference to?

I am reading about an upcoming play that reimagines a meeting between Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter on the cricket field. The play has references to their works. For instance, they both wait for a teammate named Doggo who might or might not be real - an obvious reference to Godot. The next lin...

Rand al'Thor

@GarethRees Yes, good idea. Let's do them a few at a time, so as not to fill the site's front page with old bumped posts drowning out the new questions. Maybe we can finish the job in a week or so.

3 hours later…

b_jonas

1:17 PM

literature.stackexchange.com/q/6328/139 is trickier because the quoted text doesn't exactly match the version that I have: the post has "the turgid sub-journalism of 1902"; en.wikisource.org/wiki/?curid=3430717 has "the turgid sub or suppressed journalism of 1902"; en.wikisource.org/wiki/?curid=3434334 and gutenberg.org/files/64317/64317-h/64317-h.htm have "the turgid journalism of 1902". Anyone know a source with this exact variant in the post?

I'm asking because this user posted several answers where they quote that novel, so if you know the exact version it would help for multiple posts.

Gareth already edited 6, I just edited 4 pages

Gareth Rees

1:34 PM

@b_jonas That would make a great question for Literature.se! The 1925 edition has "turgid journalism", but the 1953 copyright renewal edition has "turgid sub or suppressed journalism".

Fitzgerald died in 1940, so I wonder if it represents a genuine revision by the author, or whether it was a cunning wheeze to keep the copyright in the family until 2056 (Frances died in 1986, so life + 70 years = 2056).

b_jonas

2:08 PM

@GarethRees That's not one I'll ask because I'm not interested in that question. Though at other times I have asked a question about variants of a literary text that I do care about.

3 hours later…

Bookworm

4:52 PM

Q: Source of the 1953 revisions to "The Great Gatsby"

The 1953 Scribner’s edition of The Great Gatsby has many minor differences in wording from the first (1925) edition by the same publisher. I’ve collected some of the differences from the first fifty pages or so in the table below, to give you a sense of the changes. # 1925 edition # 1953 edit...