Publishers and Territories

This blog has been silent while JB works on proofs of a new "intellectual biography" of Shakespeare, forthcoming in the UK at the end of October, under the title Soul of the Age: the Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare and in the USA next April, under the title Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. The sub-title is only one of the many subtle differences between the US and UK versions, the result of the curious fact that, despite the best efforts of globalisation, New York and London publishers have very different views about all sorts of things, ranging from cover designs to typography to  expectations regarding assumed reader knowledge to single versus double quotation marks. We were unusually lucky to persuade our New York and London publishers to go for the same cover and content for the Complete Works. The individual volumes, now out in the USA and coming on 5 September in UK, do, by contrast, have different covers and slight differences of typography and text streaming. Content, however, is substantively the same.

In the wider world of Shakespearean textual publishing, there are some interesting questions around at the moment. For instance: Cengage Learning, publishers of the venerable Arden Shakespeare series, have recently completed acquisition of the Houghton Mifflin College Division, publishers of the Riverside Shakespeare, which -- until our arrival on the scene! -- was in our view one of the two best single volume annotated complete works editions (the other being the David Bevington). But Arden and Riverside have very different editorial principles (e.g. in the area of spelling modernization): in the long-term, one wonders how well they will sit beside each other ...