/lit/ - Literature

Norton Critical Editions are for people who can't be bothered to do a bit of historical research on the stuff they plan on reading before reading them.

Folio society is in good tier for sure

>>11419775
Almost my entire collection consists of Penguin

Affix at the top please

I don’t get the hate for penguin.
Yeah, it’s a giant corporation and all that but the books are of good quality and priced appropriately (in comparison to better books like Everyman’s)

>>11419775
NYRB deserves to be God Tier.

>>11420521
Something about those covers is just so fucking comfy

>>11419775
What's the difference between Barnes & Noble Classics and
Barnes
& Noble
Classics?

Library of America is so shit wtf? Dude they are the most uncomfy hardcovers in the world with those ugly kitchy dustjackets and use the thinnest paper available to the point where its almost transparent
Also
>people salty @ folio society for being expensive
Dude i dint have a lot of money but they make consistently artful and gorgeous editions of classics with god tier bindings, typeset and paper quality. They NEVER glue.

>>11419775
>wordsworth classics not god tier
dropped

>>11420535
Why is their cover art so fucking awful?

>>11420510
Penguin are sometimes the GOAT, and sometimes theyre shit and theres no telling which editions are gonna be shit or not. Theyre inconsistent thats all.

>>11420535
I'd say tgeir covers are really comfy, the format of the text and the format of the illustrations and the margins and the grayish black and all.
But the fuckin illustrations themselves are the most unacceptable kitch ive ever seen as book covers

Dalkey is god tier

>>11419775
>Penguin not in shit tier

>>11420500
This.

>>11420521
Good tier, or in-between good and god, is accurate in my opinion.

>>11420629
What about NYRB would prevent it from being God Tier in your opinion? Not trying to be shitty, I'm just genuinely curious what you think.

Agree with you and >>11420500 about Loeb though. Their online library needs a better interface but their physical books are GOAT.

>>11420741
I don't know what prevents them from my putting them in god tier, I simply feel they lack something that for example Everyman's and Loeb fulfill. Though don't get me wrong, they're still great, but I think they fit in on the level of Oxford World's Classics.

>>11419776
>a bit
The few Norton Criticals I have read provide a lot more than just a bit of historical context for a work, and also provide strong critical context, some of which is not readily available elsewhere especially if you don't have access to a good uni library or JSTOR

>>11420510
Oftentimes they will use subpar translations because they're free, the classics books themselves are of low quality and are relatively expensive for paperbacks.

Old school Signet Classics are incredibly underrated. They’re either built to last or fall apart after one reading, but the introductions/forewords/prefaces/afterwords/etc are usually written by an expert academic of the author/subject.
The Signet Shakespeare series is especially excellent in that the introductions are usually vehicles for the writer to drop some choice nuggets of poetic imagination, ideas and opinions you’d usually find elbow-deep in a critical study. Their notes are usually limited to translating some of the more unusual Elizabethan vocabulary. After spending my time in university diving into all kinds of critical editions, I find their generally unobtrusive and neutral footnotes useful but not distracting. The modern reprints are trash though. At best, they get a well-respected poet talking for a page and a half about how Emerson name rang through the halls of their Ivy League school, or how Thoreau influenced their poetry. At worst, they get some nobody author talking about the first time they read the book they’re introducing.

>>11419775
>Dover thrift
>not god tier

Barnes and Noble classics seem truly Haram to me

Needs dalkey in god tier, picador in good tier

>>11420490
Why?

>>11420530
who called the pleb patrol LOA are supreme

>>11420510
>good quality

they pretty much never print anything on acid free paper

hence the books look and feel and smell like shit after 10 years.

Add Nortal Critical Editions to high tier (with acid free paper) and this list is accurate.

>>11421059
>Folio Society
Hit and miss with them.
>Easton Press
But they're fucking gaudy, what are you talking about?

>>11421160
yeah but they are objectively well crafted. That can't be said for dover thrift

>>11421164
>yeah but they are objectively well crafted
Well in that case, in terms of being objectively well crafted and aesthetic, Everyman's should be in god-tier and those two put down.

>>11421180
but both FS and Easton Press are better crafted than Everyman's Library. You would know this if you've ever handled them.

>>11421186
I have FS' The Greek Myths by Graves, and though they're great and definitely better than some of the FS' I've seen, they still don't beat the couple of Everyman's I've got in terms of quality.

>>11420510

>tiny fucking typeface to save paper
>shit tier translations

Come on. They're barely a step above wordsworth classics and you know it

>>11421059

I endorse this message, though I don't like Folio society.

Any love for Loeb classics?

>>11421265
Not that anon but see: >>11420500
>>11420629
>>11420741

>>11419775
what's the logo at the top with a dog jumping over a book from??

>>11421284
Everyman's Library

>>11421200
I have Foucault's Pendulum, Meditations, and Grossman's Writer at War from FS and they seem to be of better quality, slightly, than my 10+ everyman's library books.

I love everyman's, but the paper and bind from FS seems nicer.

>>11421284
Knopf

>>11420521
Their twitter intern is insufferable

>>11421291
>Foucault's Pendulum
Is this it? I really can't get into some of these wonky designs for some of their books.
>but the paper and bind from FS seems nicer
Are they all the same? i.e. is the only difference sizing in books and the covers?

>>11421310
yeah that's the one, I don't mind the design on that one, but yeah some of the books are really gaudy.

I don't know if they are all the same quality, I just know that the three I have are slightly nicer than Everyman's Library, which I love and is my go-to. I only get FS on sale.

>>11421319
>I don't know if they are all the same quality, I just know that the three I have are slightly nicer than Everyman's Library, which I love and is my go-to. I only get FS on sale.
Alright, thanks for the info.

I admit Penguin is meh as a whole, but the paperback Penguin classics imprint is decidedly NOT meh. The black spine is gorgeous and iconic, the introductions are usually thoughtful and compelling, its library is enormous, the imprint is personally responsible for bringing to light many forgotten classics, it has the widest reach of any middlebrow publisher, and the notes are helpful and accurate.

The translations are iffy sometimes but that's just about the only thing you could knock against it, because it is more or less the best quality mass paperback on market after OWC

>>11419775
fuck you dover thrift is quality. and ww norton has a tendency to print absolute bricks that snap at the spine rather than bending with age. anchor and mythos belong at the top. where is vintage? picador? FSG?

honestly penguins don't belong on that pic anywhere

>>11420521
I like NYRB quite a lot, I just wish they weren't such insufferable faggots politically. Like, I get it, you have all the correct beliefs for someone who passed through the education system, congratulations.

>>11421367
Dude I can't deal with Dover Thrift. I understand that they are cheaper and probably the better option space wise, but I just can't deal with how densely packed the pages are. I'd rather read a book with better print that's 50 pages longer and $5 more than one of their compacted volumes where I have no space to underline and no margins to write notes in.

>>11421381
Imagine not being a left-liberal

Caring about publishers is highly pseudish. I only read used copies of Wordsworth and B&N classics I've collected from prisons and mental asylums. Ideally the cover of the book should look like a movie poster and feature a blurb from Peter Travers

>>11421394
>Imagine not being a left-liberal
Don't have to imagine, take a gander at this image friend.

>>11421392
>he writes in books

>>11421392
>where I have no space to underline and no margins to write notes in.
>not writing in a separate journal or writing the notes on your phone/PC

>>11421428
>>writing the notes on your phone/PC
>His commentaries on seminal works of world literature will never be found after the apocalypse and accepted as cannon viewpoints

>>11421474
>has accomplished nothing in terms of literature
>has the audacity to think his writing is worthy of note
Come on, now.

>>11421485
It will be worthy of note when your precious digital shit goes kaputt

>>11421491
>digital shit is destined to go "kaputt"
>but physical media could never be lost in any shape or form

>tfw there's no good edition of Shakespeare in print
I use a Heritage edition from the 1950s in three volumes (Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories). No notes, only a short introduction to each play, good text.

All the modern editions I've looked at were either huge unwieldy ant-print one-volume editions or one-volume-a-play montrosities with pedantic "critical" introductions and "explanatory" notes for low-IQ illiterate undergrads.

>>11420832
Most of the "critical material" in Norton editions, like most academic literary criticism itself, is extremely shallow.

>>11421532
The anglo world seems to love omnibuses for whatever reason.

>>11421532
>reading Shakespeare unannotated
Unless you're an actual scholar of Elizabethan literature who is already intimately familiar with both the text and the Western canon it draws upon, or reading along with an experienced teacher, this is incredibly arrogant behavior that only hurts your understanding of Shakespeare. Because of your inflated opinion of your intellect, you are missing the innumerable and obscure historical and literary references, failing to grasp the vagaries of Elizabethan speech and society that have been lost to time, misunderstanding key character traits and behaviors and motivations, misunderstanding the deliberately vague and challenging meanings of key lines and mixed metaphors that are still debated today, and in all likelihood making a humongous jackass out of yourself

Basically, because you think you are smart, you are making yourself stupid.

>>11421059
old school Dover publications had sewn-in acid free paper and were durable as fuck. i have a copy of Reichenbach's philosophy of space and time from the 90s that looks like it's been hit by a semi and still put together beautifully.

>>11419775
Library of America is meh, signet is good.
And what the fuck is wrong with B&N and Dover?

>>11420535
For their price, i'd its "good"

>>11420629
>>11420521
>>11420741

its just the price

>>11420530
I agree with this. I like how LOA bundles works together in a way with little or no overlap (if I buy bundled novels of someone's work from a variety of publishers I'll get at least one novel twice) but their paper is thinner than a Bible's and the font hurts my eyes. They should do better.

>>11421639
alright fair enough, but those aren't really all that common

>>11421603
>Because of your inflated opinion of your intellect, you are missing the innumerable and obscure historical and literary references, failing to grasp the vagaries of Elizabethan speech and society that have been lost to time, misunderstanding key character traits and behaviors and motivations, misunderstanding the deliberately vague and challenging meanings of key lines and mixed metaphors that are still debated today, and in all likelihood making a humongous jackass out of yourself
I was probably too violent in my original post. I did sometimes consult commentaries when I first started reading Shakespeare, which was necessary for understanding things like humor and puns, but I rarely do so anymore, which makes critical editions annoying. The "obscure" references in Shakespeare are mostly to classical myth and history, which Shakespeare got from such hardly-obscure authors as Plutarch, Ovid, and Virgil. The subtle differences between modern English and Elizabethan English aren't very difficult to get used to, especially because Shakespeare's speech is not as Latinite or Italianized as many of his contemporaries'. My idea is, that if one reads Shakespeare as well as other Elizabethan writers like Jonson, Marlowe, and so on, it becomes much easier to read without extensive scholarly help. Scholars themselves are simply people who have read books with more attention than others have. The important thing for me is to treat Shakespeare as a contemporary, not as a writer to "study" but a writer to read and live with, as an Elizabethan reader would have read him.

Where do we rank Gallimard, /b/ros?

>>11421647
>what the fuck is wrong with B&N
Tacky, cheaply made, fall apart easily (don't open the book if you don't want the gilding to fall off)
>what the fuck is wrong with Dover
Really?

>>11421695
Oh, I thought we were talking about the contents of the book itself. B&N has always proved good analysis and a lot of supplementary information, better than alot of the other editions.

I believe that the paper on which a text is printed does not matter as much as the text itself. Although it has been proven that certain fonts may be more legible than others, and that certain types of paper/binding may be more durable than others, I believe that, for the most part, most printed copies are read within a relatively short amount of time, and are not too likely to disintegrate before they are put back on a bookshelf. In addition, I believe that few books will be periodically consulted by large amounts of people (unless they are reference books in libraries, or something of that sort).
The true value to a book is the words which are printed inside of them. If you take something good out of them, then you have done proper use of it.

>>11421603
>live in third world shithole
>buy a collection of Shakespeare without footnotes because it's cheaper
>apparently that's arrogant and I'm a humongous jackass
k

>>11419775
The best publisher is the one that has what I want.

>>11421603
There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with approaching one of Shakespeare's plays on first read with nothing but a dictionary in hand. Afterwards, you may read many critical intepretations of the text, and compare them to what you originally understood. You may apply that knowledge you have acquired from them to your next readings of that same play. You might not be able to understand everything on the first try, nor should you only depend on one other person's interpetation of them. Between eveything that you may have learnt, and everything you might have captured on your own will be what you might consider to be the proper interpretation of the text.
It is always good to learn at least a bit about the writer's life, and their historical background before touching upon their works, in order to be able to either discard or accept certain possible critical intepretations of a text.

Penguin is pretty hit or miss but I make sure to research. OWC are usually great but I was comparing their translation of maupassant and an older one and was annoyed that instead Hussars they put horses. Something I'll have to look into but I hope they don't simplify texts. Folio is great luxury. Again, I make sure to still do research on them. An example is when I was interested in getting Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the Folio edition doesn't have the footnotes but Everyman does. I went with Everyman in the end. Library of America is great. People complain about the paper but I don't mind at all because it's meant to make those massive books more portable.

At the end of the day, just do your research and compare editions.

>>11421795
>It is always good to learn at least a bit about the writer's life, and their historical background before touching upon their works, in order to be able to either discard or accept certain possible critical intepretations of a text.
This is bullshit and Shakespeare is the perfect example of how useless this approach is. His life is half a mystery, while the known half of his life is simply useless for interpretation.

The best publisher is the one you'll read.

>>11421694
"God" tier, relative to others.
Anglo-American publishing houses are surprisingly awful if you come from French standards. Gallimard is superior to all those cited if only because of the NRF and the Pléiades.
Les Belles Lettres are true Catholic religion God tier for instance.

>>11419775
> No Faber & Faber

Ameripleb detected

>>11420860
.got all my mum's old signet Shakespeare's from the late 70s early 80s and like you said great intros and only necessary notes

>>11420860
>>11421860
So they'd be worth getting, the old ones?

>>11419775
Missing a bunch of important publishers desu

Penguin has the best artworks though

>>11421532
oxford's omnibus is pretty good except for some retarded reason it doesn't have the fucking sonnets

>>11419775
Clarendon Press (when it was still an actual imprint) should be listed as God Tier as well.

>>11420540
Because it was made using a still from some shitty movie about Lincoln killing vampires or something

>>11419775

Affix this to the tippy top tier squire

Its my comfy publisher