Post by Carl LaFong on Feb 12, 2022 14:22:51 GMT
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald’s defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.
Yet this famous ending will be lost to many readers thanks to the proliferation of substandard editions, one of which loses the last three pages and instead finishes tantalisingly halfway through a paragraph.
Experts are warning that the freedom for anyone to reproduce or reimagine books once they are out of copyright is corrupting classic texts – all for the sake of making a quick buck.
The Great Gatsby of 1925 is the quintessential novel of the hedonistic jazz age, the story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. It entered the public domain on 1 January 2021, after 95 years of copyright protection.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, his 1926 novel about disillusioned expatriates in postwar France and Spain, came out of copyright protection last month. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are among classics that will follow soon.
Alarm over the poor-quality editions of The Great Gatsby has inspired a study by James West, general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald and emeritus professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.
He said that Fitzgerald would have been “appalled” by inferior editions: “The composition of The Great Gatsby was his finest hour. It’s a delicate work of literature and you hate to see it treated so roughly.”
In his study, to be published next month in the F Scott Fitzgerald Review, West contrasts the focus on accuracy of Fitzgerald’s publisher, Scribner, with today’s “textual instability incarnate”.…..
www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/12/the-great-gatsby-copyright-expires-cheap-modern-editions