I want to talk about why most primary source reprint books are terrible and no-effort and how mine are not. It’s very important to me that original primary sources are preserved for everyone to judge at face value and read for themselves. This is a huge part of folklore studies, which I am extremely passionate about, as everyone who follows me here already knows.
It’s very difficult to find more obscure works in print – and it’s difficult to find even the slightly better-known ones in print in any kind of quality. I want to change that.
Here are some examples of how and why a lot of our current options are terrible.
Firstly, the size. Most primary source books you buy are going to be stinking huge and, frankly, also ugly. They are 0 effort. I should have grabbed more examples, but here^ is your average current-day primary source reprint, an older out of print one, and one of my own editions on the end (your right; the one with my name plastered on it and a recreation of Baring-Gould’s original cover art of the wolf).
The interior is extremely important. They come in two types: copypasted OCR data and direct scans of old books. This edition* of Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Werewolves is OCR data copypasted directly from the source, rife with typos, bad formatting, and footnotes in the middle of the text. It’s difficult to read, harder to keep notes in, the chapter headers and divers are terrible, and the page numbers don’t even make sense. This is the average printing of Baring-Gould’s work.
*: This is my copy I used in college; it’s one of the better ones I’ve found, if that’s any frame of reference (this one has been out of print for years; a more recent edition being worse is what inspired me to just publish my own). At least it’s a relatively normal size.
I recently wanted a physical copy of something I only had digital scans of before: Henri Bouget’s Examen of Witches, a book I’ve used a lot and will be using more for my upcoming folklore collection. I ordered this one from Kessinger Publishing. It’s huge, and it’s ugly.
Interior is entirely scans of the original source inserted into a print file and then slapped into the upper corner of these oversized pages. It’s ugly, blotched, and some font is unreadable from scan smears. This isn’t even an uncleaned (typos fixed) OCR edition. It’s unbelievably bad.
Again: it’s enormous. PS Vita for size (yes, the Vita still works, and yes I am going to record Uncharted: Golden Abyss for uploading). This is an extremely unwieldy book for reading, and the page layout is terrible for citation, too. It isn’t even using its full size (see above)
Compare to the interior of my own Baring-Gould edition: I have real footnotes, well-sized font and spacing fit for notes, + chapter headers and page numbers that make sense while also maintaining the same look as the original (like the subheaders under the chapter titles).
Plus, my own edition has commentary throughout in the form of footnotes to provide further discussion of werewolf legends in general, more sources for certain legends, and TRANSLATIONS of Baring-Gould’s quoted passages (I have yet to encounter another edition that has this), while also keeping Baring-Gould’s original text and footnotes.
So, in conclusion, I think I’m going to publish my own edition of Henri Bouget’s work, as well, for anyone looking for a good print (and even an ebook edition) of this primary source on witchcraft, the occult in general, and even werewolves.
Maybe I will make part of my branding accessible, affordable, readable, and fixed-up but still entirely faithful (not modernized) reprints of primary sources on folklore…