Professor of English, Washington State University. Late nineteenth- and early 20th-century Americanist and digital humanities. https://hub.wsu.edu/campbell and http://donnamcampbell.net
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton welcomes Francis Morrone as editor of Volume 6, Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens
FRANCIS MORRONE
Francis Morrone is an architectural historian and the author of eleven books including Guide to New York City Urban Landscapes (W.W. Norton, 2013); The New York Public Library: The Architecture and Decoration of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (with Henry Hope Reed, W.W. Norton, 2011); and architectural guidebooks to Philadelphia and Brooklyn. As a historic preservation consultant he has written countless building histories and neighborhood surveys in New York and beyond. He worked as an art and architecture critic for the New York Sun. Collectively, his work represents one of the most comprehensive bodies of research on the built history of New York City. He has taught at NYUSPS for nineteen years, and is the recipient of the SPS Excellence in Teaching Award.
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Mischa Renfroe as the editor of Volume 13: The Reef
Alicia Mischa Renfroe is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University where she teaches courses on law and literature and American literature. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and her J.D. from the University of Florida, and most of her research draws on this interdisciplinary background. Recent publications include “Edith Wharton and Law” in Critical Insights:Edith Wharton in Context, “Edith Wharton Online: Reimagining the Graduate Seminar” in Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels, “Social Protest Fiction” in The Blackwell Companion to American Literature1820-1914, and “The Specter and the Spectator: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘The Second Life’ and the Naturalist Gothic” in Haunting Realities. She also edited Davis’s novel Law Unto Herself (1878) for the University of Nebraska Press’s Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Writers series and has published on Louisa May Alcott, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. She is site director of Rebecca Harding Davis Collected Works Digital Archive, editor of the Davis Society’s newsletter, co-director of Constance Fenimore Woolson Fest, co-editor of a special issue of Women’s Studies devoted to Davis, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Louisa May Alcott Society.
The Edith Wharton Review invites submissions for a Special Issue celebrating the centenary of The Age of Innocence.
We welcome essays on any aspect of Wharton’s acclaimed novel, from the historical to the queer, from the architectural to the gastronomic. We are especially interested in essays that interpret The Age of Innocence in relation to our contemporary historical moment from the perspective of current critical theories, new reading practices, political climates, and global contexts. One hundred years since its publication, the novel remains relevant, and we seek comparative and cross-disciplinary efforts including engagements with age, temporalities, embodiment and dis/ability.
Wharton scholars might be interested in newly available digitized archival materials in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. A significant trove of Wharton letters and other manuscripts and business papers have been posted online. Individual pages can be downloaded as .tiffs or the entire file as a .pdf (which requires less computer space). Happy Reading!
Here’s a link to the results from a general search in Finding Aids site for Edith Wharton. Click online materials on the left.
“She was bad . . . always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
–Edith Wharton, New Year’s Day, 1924
As of today, January 1, 2020, Wharton’s quartet of novellas Old New York is in the public domain. To celebrate this, here’s New Year’s Day(the Seventies), courtesy of Project Gutenberg Australia.
NEW YEAR'S DAY
(The 'Seventies)
I
"She was BAD...always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue
Hotel," said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the
guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles
slanted on her knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might
have singed the snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable
fingers. (It was typical of my mother to be always employed in
benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.)
"THEY USED TO MEET AT THE FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL"; how the precision of
the phrase characterized my old New York! A generation later, people
would have said, in reporting an affair such as Lizzie Hazeldean's
with Henry Prest: "They met in hotels"--and today who but a few
superannuated spinsters, still feeding on the venom secreted in their
youth, would take any interest in the tracing of such topographies?
Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given
point in a sentimental relation; as old Sillerton Jackson, in
response to my mother, grumbled through his perfect "china set":
"Fifth Avenue Hotel? They might meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue
nowadays, for all that anybody cares."
But what a flood of light my mother's tart phrase had suddenly
focussed on an unremarked incident of my boyhood!
The Fifth Avenue Hotel...Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest...the
conjunction of these names had arrested her darting talk on a single
point of my memory, as a search-light, suddenly checked in its
gyrations, is held motionless while one notes each of the unnaturally
sharp and lustrous images it picks out.
At the time I was a boy of twelve, at home from school for the
holidays. My mother's mother, Grandmamma Parrett, still lived in the
house in West Twenty-third Street which Grandpapa had built in his
pioneering youth, in days when people shuddered at the perils of
living north of Union Square--days that Grandmamma and my parents
looked back to with a joking incredulity as the years passed and the
new houses advanced steadily Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth
Streets, taking the Reservoir at a bound, and leaving us in what, in
my school-days, was already a dullish back-water between Aristocracy
to the south and Money to the north. (continued at the link above)
Here’s a brief cross-post about editing devices from the Complete Works of Edith Wharton editors’ site.
Volume Editors have many methods of comparing texts, some of which are text based (relying on typed text) and some of which are image based (relying on photographs or physical volumes). If you have other resources, please feel free to add them here. See also the works in the bibliography for the Editorial Guidelines and the brief guide to editions, printings, and states here: https://www.abaa.org/blog/post/first-state-notes
Different methods, text-based or image-based, will work better depending on what you’re comparing.
EDITIONS, which will usually be set from different plates and have different typefaces and page numbers (e.g., Scribner’s first edition, Macmillan [British] first edition, and so on), can’t be compared with image-based technology because of the the differences in typefaces and pagination. What’s on page 31 of the Scribner’s first edition of The House of Mirth will not be similar enough to what’s on page 31 of the Macmillan edition to make a comparison of individual words and letters possible, for the words will not be on the same lines. EDITIONS will need to be typed so that the text can be compared using Juxta or another text-based method.
2. PRINTINGS, which will be printed from the same plate as the first edition with the same typeface and page numbers, will differ little in appearance. The same material will be found on p. 3 of the Scribner’s edition, first printing and the Scribner’s edition, 5th printing, and the words will appear on the same line. PRINTINGS can be compared using image-based comparison methods like the Hinman or other image-based technologies.
The image on the left is from page 31 of the first Scribner’s edition of The House of Mirth; the second image is from page 31 of the Macmillan (British) first edition.
The House of Mirth, Scribner’s first edition
The House of Mirth, Macmillan first edition
Text-based comparisons
Text-based comparisons let you look at the differences between two typed documents. Most of us are already used to doing this in Word, but Juxta Commons is useful for more complex comparisons.
Text-based methods are useful when you are comparing different EDITIONS of a book.
Juxta Commons. http://juxtacommons.org/ This easy-to-use and free software can compare two screens of text at once and can identify the differences by highlighting them. Juxta looks like this:
To get typed text to compare, you might try these:
Typing the volume into a text editor (like Notepad or Text Wrangler) or into Word.
Using a typed version or the raw OCR (Optical Character Recognition) version found online that you proofread carefully against the copy-text volume (usually the first American edition). When raw OCR text comes out of the scanner, you’ll see that it is kind of a mess. There are odd characters, like ! instead of 1, m instead of rr, and even worse. You can see a little of this if you try to convert a .pdf document back into text using Google Docs. Whenever scanned text is used, it has to be carefully proofread.You may see references to “cleaning” the raw OCR text. “Cleaning” is just a term from data processing; it means to correct the data (in this case the text) according to the scanned material so that it makes sense.
Adobe Acrobat Pro can turn .pdf files into text, but the text it creates must be carefully proofread.
Google Docs is supposed to be able to turn .pdf files into text, but the text it creates must be carefully proofread.
Scanning the copy-text volume with a specialty software such as ABBYY Finereader https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/ This text must also be carefully proofread but is supposed to have fewer errors than other scanning to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) kinds of programs.
Image-based comparisons
If you have taken pictures of several printings of the volume you’ll be editing, image-based or digital comparison software will be helpful.
Traherne Digital Collator, a free comparison and collation software. The Traherne Digital Collator compares two page images so that you can see differences between, say, the first and second printing of a volume.
In the screenshots below, the top image compares the first edition of The House of Mirth, from a copy in the Lilly Library, with a copy of the first edition in the Beinecke Library. Note the broken character on the running title (HOUSE), which is illuminated by a red color instead of purple in the second image.
2. Pocket Hinman. The Pocket Hinman is a free experimental app developed for James Ascher and DeVan Ard. It’s available for iPhone and Android through the App store and here: https://rossharding.me/#/pockethinman/
The Pocket Hinman allows you to compare visually a volume that you’re looking at with a previous picture of a volume. Differences will stand out by flickering slightly.
Mechanical Comparators and Collators
If you live near a research library or are visiting one, you can use these older devices to compare physical volumes of the text: the two major kinds are the Hinman Collator and the Lindstrand Comparator.
Hinman Collator. Developed by Charlton Hinman from WWII bomb target technologies that compared two images and found slight differences by flickering images and used in creating comparative versions of the First Folio, the Hinman Collator can find small differences that indicate changes from one printing to the next.
Here’s article from the Folger Library that describes the Hinman in more detail:
Here’s a demonstration of the Hinman Collator in action, with text by James P. Ascher, who developed the Pocket Hinman:
The following article from 2002 that gives all the then-locations of Hinman Collators, Lindstrand Comparators, and other mechanical editing devices. Each of the major Edith Wharton archives has a Hinman or Lindstrand machine available.
“Armadillos of Invention”: A Census of Mechanical Collators
Author(s): Steven Escar Smith Source: Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 55 (2002), pp. 133-170 Published by: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia
For the first half of her career, Edith Wharton published her books through the Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing house in New York. The archives are at Princeton University in the Charles Scribner’s Sons collection. Below is a brief research note shared among the volume editors, part of an ongoing series describing our work in progress on CWEWh.
and we thought a brief note about the “letter books” might be helpful. Please ignore this if it’s already common knowledge.
Before file folders and file cabinets were invented, it was common to take an image of an outgoing letter in a letterpress (while the ink was damp) and, for letters received, to paste them into a book, like a scrapbook. These books were then indexed with short descriptions so that the contents were known and could be looked up.
The first folder of Box 193 of the Charles Scribner’s Sons Archive has several pages of a letter book index. The entries look like this:
WCB #9 7/6/1904 p. 385 to EW
“Mentions “the Letter” which appears in the Macmillan edition and not in Scribners, and comments at length on her apparent “absent-mindedness.”
“WCB” indicates that the letter is from William Crary Brownell, her editor, to EW (Edith Wharton). The 7/6/1904 uses the American convention of month, day, and year to indicate July 6, 1904. The “#9” indicates that it was at one time in Book 9, on p. 385, and the description shows the content of the letter.
Why look at these when you can read the letters themselves?
The Letter Book index gives a good sense of the trajectory of the letters over a period of time, even when the letters themselves may not be extant. For example, the index refers to replies by Brownell, Charles Scribner, or Edward Burlingame to some letters of EW that don’t appear in the folders.
I can’t show a photograph because of the restrictions on the collection, but that’s what the index to the Letter Books looks like and what it means.
CWEWh welcomes Paul Ohler as the Volume Editor for Vol. 2: Short Stories I: 1891-1903. Paul Ohler earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia. His publications include Edith Wharton’s ‘Evolutionary Conception:’ Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (Routledge, 2006), as well as articles in English Studies in Canada, Edith Wharton Review, and America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture (U of Georgia Press, 2014). He is co-associate editor with Sharon Kim of the Edith Wharton Review and serves as Vice-President of the Edith Wharton Society. He teaches 19th and 20thcentury American literature at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
CWEWh welcomes Katherine Joslinas the Volume Editor for volume 11, The Fruit of the Tree. Katherine Joslin is a professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University. Her books include Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion in the Becoming Modern Series (University Press of New England, 2009); Jane Addams, A Writer’s Life (Illinois, 2004; paperback 2009), a literary biography that places the social settlement founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the company of American writers; and Edith Wharton in the Women Writers Series (Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1991; paperback 1994), a part of the resurgence in Wharton studies (Joslin is a founding member of the Edith Wharton Society). She co-edited Wretched Exotic: Essays on Wharton in Europe (Peter Lang 1993; paperback 1996), a selection of essays from a conference she directed in Paris; and American Feminism (Routledge, 2003), a four-volume collection of source documents from 1848 to 1920.
CWEWh welcomes Rita Bode as the Volume Editor for volume 7, Novellas. A longtime Wharton scholar whose research includes nineteenth-century transatlantic women writers, Dr. Bode is an associate professor of English at Trent University. Read more about her work at this link: https://www.trentu.ca/english/faculty-research/rita-bode
“She was bad . . . always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
For the first half of her career, Edith Wharton published her books through the Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing house in New York. The archives are at Princeton University in the Charles Scribner’s Sons collection. Below is a brief research note shared among the volume editors, part of an ongoing series describing our work in progress on CWEWh.
CWEWh welcomes 
Complete Works of Edith Wharton 