Preserve or Improve?
Carl & Jerry fans have been beating my door down wanting to know where Volume 4 is, and so I've been spending all spare cycles on getting the book done in time for release by Halloween. I have all the story text scanned in and OCRed, and now I'm doing the edit pass on the text, fixing OCR errors and removing whatever formatting inconsistences the OCR software inserted. (It paints what it sees, and it doesn't always see precisely the same font size, column width, etc.)
And once again I confront a conundrum I've confronted repeatedly since I first attempted to resurrect old printed material several years ago, with an 1875 history book called The New Reformation: How much do you improve a text that you're preserving? Do you preserve the errors? Do you make it easier to read? The New Reformation was written in Victorian times for a British audience. I agonized over whether to give it a modern copy edit to make it more accessible to American readers in 2007. (There are plenty of Americans who do not have any idea what a "gaol" is.) I ended up changing British spellings to American spellings but left the stuffy diction intact. I'm a crackshot copy editor and could have made it a lot easier for moderns to read. I often wonder if I should have. I just don't know, but I think I did the right thing.
It's tougher with Carl & Jerry. The stories were never meant to be literature, and none of us griped about the quality of the writing-the quirkiness of the writing, in fact, is part of the series' charm. However, it looks like Popular Electronics in the 1954-1964 era did little or no copy editing, and in fact little proofreading. For example, last night I spotted the following:
Carl pushed open the door to discover Jerry speakingly slowly...
Easy call, and easy fix. Other things are a tougher call:
Both boys belonged to the Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps, familiarly known on the campus as "rot-see," and that is why they were in the armory. Strictly speaking, that is why Jerry was in the armory.
Not everyone would call that an error, but to me it "sounds funny." I fixed it. A little later, I ran across this:
"Right here," Jerry replied, poking the little glass beads, each of which was about three-tenths of an inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter, with a forefinger.
Technically correct, but it sure sounds like the glass beads had forefingers. (I left that one as-is.) Multiply that by fifteen or twenty such decisions per story, and you'll see what I'm up against.
I had the same reaction recently while reading The Skylark of Space as a text file on my Tablet PC. Reading it on a display (as opposed to reading it in a book) engaged my editor's reflexes, and I kept catching myself thinking how I could make it read a lot better with a little polishing. Its copyrights have expired, so no one could make a legal case if I did-but I think Doc Smith's fans would be upset. Were I (or anyone) to take the edge off Smith's legendary clunker writing style, something would be missing, and it's tough to explain just what. Any competent editor could make the pulps read better, but where (or what) would the pulps be if they didn't sound...pulpy?
What all do we value in older writing? Tough question, especially when you have the power to change it. Is there any use in a concept we might call FanEd, as opposed to Fanfic? People are doing this; see Tom Swift Lives! for an example of a fan who is literally rewriting the old Tom Swift, Jr. books to make them read better. He's a good writer, and it works, though there's little left of the original in some of the rewrites, which are more properly fanfic. Some of the later Tom Swift Jr. books were so bad as to be called "unreadable" even by their fans. Should they be fixed?
No answers-but it's an interesting question, and as an editor, one I face on a regular basis.