This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada.
It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon.
I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.
The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad.
"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.
Ron once agaiin shakes his head in disbelief...
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