The title page of Nicholl's volume reads as follows: "CHARLES NICHOLL | The Lodger | His Life on Silver Street | Viking." Something missing there, no? Turns out the book was published in the UK in 2007 by Allen Lane as The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. When they got around to resetting the title page for the US release, they fixed the subtitle but not the title itself. Would that they'd been willing to spend the money for the UK endpapers, which the List of Illustrations tells me show "The 'Agas' map of London, c. 1561." The US endpapers are quite blank.
The Barker, on the other hand, is an entirely different piscine kettle. The book seemed a bit slim for a biography of the long-lived laureate, until I realized that the paper was thin enough to account for some 548 closely printed pages. But what's missing? Alas, the entire scholarly apparatus: no references, no notes, no bibliography. Then I consulted the copyright page, where I read: "First published in the United Kingdom by Viking 2000. | This abridged edition published in Penguin Books 2001. | First American edition 2005." According to James Fenton's New York Times review, the original British hardcover clocked in at almost 1000 pages, so the abridgment involves a good deal more than just the 134 original pages of notes and bibliography.
Two comments: First off, it's entirely reprehensible for Ecco to run glowing review quotations from the TLS, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, & a buttload of other British papers on the back of Barker's book without telling the reader that they refer to a substantially different edition of the text. Sorry. Just isn't right. Cheating. Secondly: Reading a biography without references is like having sex without protection; you may be just fine, but in the end you really don't know what you're getting into.
4 comments:
Reading a biography without references is like having sex without protection; you may be just fine, but in the end you really don't know what you're getting into.
But for some people, that sense of danger is surely part of the appeal. Reading a biography that's not even footnooted is just so naughty.
Of all the jokes that entered my head upon reading that line, that one seemed most family-friendly. I'm trying to clean up my act in 2009.
Cheating by a publisher? I'm shocked, shocked. And here I thought peddling fiction as autobiography was the only shady deal they practiced.
Bringing home a book that upon further review causes one to cringe in horror may be a sign of something serious, bibliophilia-wise.
And remember, cavett empty [insert winking emoticon here] around the bargain bin in bookstores.
I have a perhaps unwise question -- if you're too professional to answer it, Mark, I'll understand. At Christmas, I was given Jeffrey Meyers' Johnson bio. I'm interested, but I'm having trouble getting started because, it seems to me, Meyers writes really badly. Am I alone in this impression? None of the reviews seems to mention a problem....
"Reading a biography without references is like having sex without protection; you may be just fine, but in the end you really don't know what you're getting into."
You know what you're getting into, Mark. You just don't know what you're going to get out of it!
"epubjel": a new product from KY for authors who want to ease into electronic publication--
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