Facsimiles and their Limits: The New Edition of Yeats’s The Winding Stair and Other Poems

This essay uses the recent 2011 volume of W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems: a Facsimile Edition to argue that so-called facsimile editions can never be exact replicas of literary works but necessarily differ in various and important ways. Chief among them in this case are cover design, paper, and binding among other elements. Some of these are inevitable, but others result from often legitimate organizational and financial demands of publishers. A “facsimile edition” will always be a new edition, even if of a special kind.