On Mon, 25 Jul 2005, Marc Carlson wrote:

> Robin, just out of curiousity, what sorts of changes did Planche make?

Oh, you would ask! It's been ten years since I've compared them, and it
was at a time when I was looking at a *lot* of books from that period, so
I don't trust my memory. I think mostly it was footnotes commenting on
Strutt's text, and also IIRC the pictures are smaller and not colored. I
don't know if they were re-engraved (which could mean serious differences
in the visual details); I'd have to compare them to remind myself.
Strutt's original pictures were one to a page in a nice spacious layout,
and hand-colored.

I just dug out a Xerox of Planche's introduction to his edition. He says
that he corrected things like dates on artworks, manuscript numbers,
verses and line numbers on quotations, and such. I'm sure he did catch
some errors by Strutt, but given the number of errors I've found in
Planche's own work, I'd frankly want to doublecheck everything back to the
source rather than trust anything he had his hands on.

Planche marks his footnotes in brackets, but I would not put it past him
to have made subtle changes to the text as well. He occasionally "fixed
up" sources in some of his other work. Strutt, by contrast, placed a
higher value on faithful reproduction; his errors tend to be those of
misinterpretation, not intentional adjustment.

Planche literally calls his revision of Strutt the "New and Improved
Edition." Tee hee.

--Robin

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