Quote:
Originally Posted by Connavar of Rigante  Update Dagon? Why? is something wrong with my version? |
As has been discussed in some other thread, the Omnibus volumes are based on old magazine appearances that were flawed to begin with, and over the years more and more misprints have crept in and become fossilized.
A couple of examples, taken from all the Omnibuses:
* In "The Other Gods", "the seven cryptical books of earth" should be
"the seven cryptical books of Hsan".
* In "the Call of Cthulhu", the subtitle, "Found among the Papers of
the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston", is missing.
* In "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" all "Zoogs" should be "zoogs"
and "Inquanok" should be "Inganok". In one place "beings" have become
"priests" (or maybe it was the other way around -- I forget).
* In "The Quest of Iranon", "and thou wouldst" should be "an thou
wouldst" (Shakespearean "an" meaning "if"). Correct in the Penguin
edition but nowhere else.
* The correct title of "Arthur Jermyn" is "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".
* The correct title of "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is "Under the Pyramids".
* The fragment "The Thing in the Moonlight" is a fake.
* Of the "Early Tales", only "The Alchemist" and "The Beast in the Cave" are actually early. All the others were written
after "The Tomb" and "Dagon".
* The introduction to
Dagon by August Derleth, with the "bibliography" concocted by Derleth, s-u-c-k-s. (At least I think it appeared in
Dagon.)
* "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is an older version -- HPL revised it slightly later, and these changes are not in the Omnibus
Dagon.
* The text of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" as it appears in the Omnibus
At the Mountains of Madness is severely flawed. Not only is the text off in many places, but there's also a bad misprint that replaces the first line of one chapter with the first line of another chapter. This misprint has been around since at least the 1970s and the publisher has not bothered to correct it (I found it in 1992 and I can't believe I'm the first.).
And what really annoys me is that Gollancz had every chance in the world to publish a good Lovecraft collection with their upcoming
Necronomicon, but what do they do? They will use the old texts and not HPL's originals because they already owned the rights to the old texts, and because August Derleth was such a brilliant editor (see Joshi's "Textual Problems in Lovecraft" for a different view; Joshi's opinion is that Messrs. Wandrei & Derleth had an uncanny knack for picking the very worst textual versions almost evey single time). I suppose I'll get it anyway, but only to have the flawed versions available.