Thoughts on Reviewing Textbook Editions and Student Companions

During the fifteen years I have functioned as Book Review Editor for the Scriblerian, I have often been asked why I persist with the onerous task, especially into the twilight of my career. The incentive is certainly not scrambling for reviewers or soliciting review copies: often three, four, even five requests are necessary before finding a willing and competent reviewer; and publishers are increasingly loath to distribute review copies, given the industry's dwindling margins. Nor is there any pleasure in chasing down tardy reviews. Finally, copyediting the reviews within the rigorous standards we maintain at the Scriblerian is not much of an incentive, although one does enjoy demonstrating how easily 2,000 words can be reduced to our standard 1,200.

Pressed to explain myself, I usually confess that the primary reward is opening packages containing new books—when we stop enjoying that experience we will have reached the end of our enterprise. A secondary pleasure, however, is when a reviewer responds with a review at once informative, evaluative, beautifully written, and appreciative equally of what the author has achieved and what the profession requires. I was reminded of this pleasure when the Scriblerian received two fine examples of the art of literary reviewing for inclusion in its Spring 2019 issue, one an article review by James McLaverty of James E. May's "Offset Evidence in Edward Young's The Centaur Not Fabulous," the other, a book review by May of an edition of the poetry of Laurence Whyte, ed. Michael Griffin.

At the time I received those reviews, I found myself confronting two persistent problems for a twenty-first-century Book Review Editor: collections of essays and textbook editions. Essay collections seem to be replacing monographs as the most common form of scholarly publication, but I would note an essential difference between scholarly essays and those designed for student consumption. The first may originate in a conference or symposium or simply an editor's head; the second consists of essays gathered for a volume in an ongoing series: the MLA Approaches or Cambridge Companions are particularly prolific examples. I will concentrate here on this second type, confessing beforehand to having participated as editor or contributor to both series. It is difficult to decline invitations from publishers or friends—a point to which I shall return.

Textbook editions and these casebook collections are directed toward students rather than the professors who teach them. In both instances the crucial difference in audience is too often ignored. Scholarly editions are not mass-market editions, textbook editions are not scholarly editions. Several years ago, I reviewed a poorly conceived textbook edition of Haywood's The Invisible Spy masking itself as a scholarly one (Scriblerian (2016), 155–158) and raised the question of why Pickering and Chatto would price a classroom text at $100. Conversely, if a scholarly edition of Pamela I is produced today, we would expect it to engage in textual and annotative work beyond that of previous editions (and receive the support necessary to these labors), The new Cambridge edition fails this standard when contrasted, for example, to the solid Cambridge edition of Pamela II by the same editor. When scholarly editions are subject to concerns about being too scholarly for a general audience, or too costly to produce because of multiple editions demanding collation, one is in trouble.

Given the dwindling student population in the Humanities—and thus in eighteenth-century studies—the plethora of textbooks is a puzzle: do publishers always know what they are doing? Every year we see proof of fiscal miscalculation in the demise of publishing houses; eighteenth-century scholars must now deplore the recent loss of Ashgate, AMS, and New England University Press, among others. There are good reasons for textbook editions of women authors not previously available, but surely ten editions of Oroonoko is overkill. We certainly can never have enough of Johnson, but is the 21st-Century Oxford Authors edition (2018), weighing in at 1,294 pages and $117, actually "designed for the student and the general reader," as the dust jacket states? Surely other textbook editions of Johnson...