Leave It to Psmith (variorum edition) (PDF, 1,618 KB)
Hopefully this is only the first of several similar projects: an edition of a Wodehouse book that has already entered the public domain in the US, recording all the differences between the various versions of its text: magazines, UK and US books, and later editions. To do this I've used the fist edition of UK book as base text, and added footnotes with all the variants observed in other versions. (In one case in this particular book one section was so heavily rewritten that it was more practical to print the text in two columns.)
Although all the footnotes are presented at the same level, the differences they contain are really of two kinds. On the one hand, differences between its serialization in magazines prior to the publication of the novel in book form, and between the UK and US book, very often represent authorial decisions: additions and deletions, choices of vocabulary and other changes made by Wodehouse to accomodate the text to its intended audience; or they may mark stages in the composition, as he found ways to improve the narrative or detected errors (such as lack of continuity). Sometimes these can be attributed to his editors, and at this distance in time it may be impossible to find out which was the case.
Differences in later editions (particularly British), on the other hand, may at times have been due to Wodehouse when they were published during his lifetime, but more often are either conscious decisions made by editors, or mere errors that are unavoidably introduced during a resetting of the text. They tend to be perpetuated in successive editions, since each new one is usually based not on the first (and theoretically best) but on the latest. In this case, the variorum edition may be useful to determine at what point each change entered the history of the text and whether it should be maintained in an ideal edition.
This edition presents the bare differences, without attempting to explain the reasons behind each change. This is best done in a running commentary, which already exists in the Annotations published at Madame Eulalie's Rare Plums, where the most significant of the differences described here are discussed from a literary and editorial perspective.
A short introduction provides full details of the texts and conventions used, plus additional resources and bibliography. In the text, I've tried to distinguish between the actual text and the editorial intervention using dark red for the latter.
This is not a reading text. The page is perhaps too large, and the footnotes are somewhat intrusive. I like to think of it as a scholar's text, that could be useful as a tool for studying its composition and history. If you just want to enjoy the novel, nothing beats a traditional printed book.
This edition has been prepared using Google Docs. GDocs is very limited in terms of the formatting possibilities it offers, and I'm not too happy about some of the issues resulting from these limitations, such as the fact that footnote callouts can be separated at the end of a line. Better results could be obtained with other word processors like MS Word, but they all have shortcomings when used for this kind of work. Ideally should be done using a critical text editing software, with numbered lines and a proper critical apparatus, but I don't have one at present. So rather than converting it to a better word processor I'll wait until I can have continued access to a professional tool.
I don't suppose for a moment that this variorum edition is perfect or complete. I'm quite confident about the analysis of the four main texts, but there are 500+ footnotes recording differences, and it is very easy for errors to creep in when you're dealing with such a large amont of data. I would also like to analyze the later editions better, and include others that are not available to me now, and to establish the dependence between book editions (now only tentatively done n the introduction). So I will probably update this file in the future, changing the date given at the end of the introduction.
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