How we make the editions
Six rules we follow for every title.
The six rules
The author’s text
We set the author’s text complete, in its own spelling and punctuation, and correct only plain errors of transcription. A summary can give you a book’s argument, but its examples and its language come only with the whole. Where an edition is a selection, or leaves out an editor’s preface or notes, its page says so.
A named translation
Where a work comes to us in translation, we choose one and name it on the title page: Butler’s Homer, Mackail’s Virgil, Jowett’s Plato, Garnett’s Dostoevsky, Wheen’s Remarque.
One page for every title
A 7 by 10 inch page of thirty-nine lines, EB Garamond at 11 on 15 points with about sixty-seven characters to a line, a ruled column in the outer margin, and a line number every fifth line, counted fresh on each page.
The page in detailPrompts that stay inside the book
One prompt closes each chapter, thirty-five to sixty-five words. It begins with something the chapter gives, asks a question the page can answer more than one way, and sets something small to do in the margin.
Checked before press
No widows or orphans, no prompt stranded at the top of a page, every chapter with its prompt, and every prompt read against its chapter by someone other than its writer.
Made to be kept
Sewn signatures, cloth over board and heavy cream paper, so that a book written in at fourteen is still whole at forty.
What a prompt asks
A prompt begins with something the chapter gives: a line, a choice, a moment. It asks a question the page can answer in more than one way, and nothing needs looking up. The small task that follows gathers the grounds for an answer: underline what a character says, bracket what she only heard, number the steps of an argument.
A prompt from the first book of the Iliad:
Commonplace
Achilles is “in two minds” and already drawing his sword when Minerva seizes him “by his yellow hair, visible to him alone.” Who decides that Agamemnon lives, the goddess or the man? Bracket what she forbids and what she still allows, then read his answer to her and judge how willingly he gives it.