The Wind in the Willows—a great children’s lit classic, also appealing to many adults and packed with lovable, humanlike animals—appeared in 1908 without illustrations.
Over the years many have taken a stab at accompanying art, and here’s a new freebie from Wowio with Colin Throm‘s amazing work. Yes, he is very much alive strikes me as well worth the attention of other publishers, E and P.
More wrinkles
Wowio’s new edition of Kenneth Grahame‘s masterpiece also “incorporates updates in punctuation (e.g., changing arm-chair to armchair) and converting words that utilized British spelling into their American counterpart (e.g., humour to humor).
“Additionally, editor’s notes are incorporated to help clarify certain areas of the text. The editor’s notes are placed between brackets.”
Related: Manybooks.net editon—without all the extras but in more formats than PDF.
Interesting find: Manybooks sends us to an Amazon server for the PDF version. This is a way for owner Matt McClintock to save bandwidth, and in his place I’d most likely do the same thing. Along the way, it’s another reminder that public domain sites need to be run sustainably, one reason why I heartily approve of Project Gutenberg‘s decision to try ads. My optimal model remains the library one. But it isn’t and shouldn’t a universal solution.
Wowio details: The service is ad-supported, but except for Wowio promo at the start of the book, I don’t see any ads in the version I just downloaded. Alas, for copyright-related reasons, Wowio isn’t available except to U.S. residents. The company hopes that will change.
The font debate angle: I find Wowio’s font attractive in TWITW, but different to read. ePub, anyone?
incorporates updates in punctuation and conversion from British to American spelling?
Gah! So this is no-longer Kenneth Grahame’s book you are talking about, it is some plagiariased book 99.9% based on the Wind in the Willows! Surely Teleread does not support or condone such vandalism by wowio?
What next, Shakespear in leet speek?
A tricky issue, Steve. Normally I’d say, “Go with the original.” But here we’re talking about an ad-supported book intended for a mass audience and not for scholarly reference. I use the term “ad-supported” a bit loosely since the book, as I recall, contains only one ad—for Wowio itself.
Wowio, moreover, has leveled with people about what it was doing, and if the changes contribute to the readability of TWITW for a potentially large U.S. readership, then this could be helpful. Plagiarism? Not quite. The byline remains the same.
Now–the closing argument. Many and perhaps most U.K. novels published in the States get Americanized spellings, and keep in mind that, alas, for now at least, Wowio is a U.S.-only service. I’d love to hear how others feel, especially librarians and publishers. Meanwhle thanks for sharing your own thoughts, Steve.
David
I’m with Steve on this. As a child, I read Wind in the Willows and don’t remember being offended by English spellings. Because BooksForABuck.com is open to authors (and customers of course) from different countries, one of the choices I had to make was whether to standardize on American style/spelling. I decided not to do so. My English and Australian authors are free to use British spelling.
I’d be interested to hear from school teachers and librarians on whether they think this book needs to be made more accessible to the American reading population.
Not to take anything away from Wowio’s effort to provide attractive artwork for a wonderful book.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
David
I hadn’t thought about contemporary novels being handled in that way but it makes sense – I expect the authors sign-up to it in some way when they agree to foreign publication. And I hadn’t even thought about translation to other languages which is far more of a radical departure from the original.
Somehow it feels worse done to the works of a deceased author who may not be able to give consent.
I would like to think that Americans can handle UK English without problems, in the same way that we can tolerate US spelling. And I don’t think the book being Ad-Supported Mass Audience really justifies the vandalism (emote emote)
I believe it is useful for people to see how the language has changed in a relatively short time – are these anachronisms really a barrier to comprehension?
(And thanks for not upbraiding me for my misspellings, UK or US – I enjoy the blog a lot and support your campaigns against ebabel)
– er I meant, cannot give consent. Blog if any deceased authors do manage to consent …
Steve, thanks for your nice notes. This-here issue of spelling does bother me even in a TeleBlog sense.
We’re an international blog and currently enjoy better Alexa rankings in Germany and the U.K. than in the States. Bobs up and down. Right now I suspect that about half our readers are from outside the U.S.
Confession time. Just for the sake of consistency, I change U.K. and Canadian spellings to American ones in the regular posts when I have a chance. But, yes, I feel guilty about it. In your case, I won’t–even if you write something for the featured part of the blog. What’s more, I’d never criticize anyone for using correct spelling from Country X or Y; that would be very provincial and plain bad manners. Keep the feedback coming!
As for the TWITW, again, I’d want the original spelling in an edition on which scholars would rely. I just think that these little details could matter to some readers of the popular edition. I’ll welcome others’ opinions; this is indeed a matter worthy of discussion.
Thanks,
David
Steve Bolton asks “What next, Shakespeare in leet speek?”
The spelling styles used in classic works are sometimes updated. For example there is an edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that has been “put into modern spelling by Michael Murphy.” The introduction to the modified text provides the following rationale:
The texts of Shakespeare’s plays and poems have changed over time. Shakespeare’s texts with original spellings are available online in facsimile editions. I just checked one facsimile that gives “The History of Henrie the Fovrth” on one page and “The Historie of Henry the Fourth” on the next page.
From a linguistics perspective, it’s still all the same words. Will you read it differently? Sure, it may no longer carry that pretty English charm that we Americans might associate with those goofy spellings, but isn’t that charm an artificial construction associated with a notion of “otherness” to begin with? But then again, I kinda like that charm…
Ok, I am persuaded! But I had fun writing the first comment… 🙂