The Two V.s of Thomas Pynchon

[Tom Beshear]

Fascinating. You'd think TRP would have put up a fuss. I'd think he and his 
agent could have gotten that fixed. Happy I have my two copies of the '60s 
Bantam PB.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2012 9:08 PM
Subject: The Two V.s of Thomas Pynchon


The Two V.s of Thomas Pynchon, or From Lippincott to Jonathan Cape and 
Beyond
Albert Rolls

Abstract

Two versions of V. were issued in 1963, one in the U.S. and one in
England, because errors that had crept into the first American edition
were found and corrected in time for the British edition’s release.
Pynchon would be able to get the corrections he had made for the
British edition into the American paperback the following year. The
fact that the first U.S. edition needed to be corrected was forgotten,
and with the exception of those printed by Bantam, the U.S. paperback
publisher, all other U.S. editions are reproductions of the
uncorrected first American edition. This paper traces the editorial
history of V. after its publication, detailing the differences between
the corrected and uncorrected editions of the novel.

https://pynchon.net/owap/article/view/33

The issue, in any case, should have been settled, indeed had been
settled in Britain and in the United States for about twenty years —
between 1967 and 1986 — while the corrected Bantam edition was the
only U.S. text being reproduced, but the problem resurfaced when
Bantam lost the rights to reprint its edition and Lippincott's fiction
catalogue was taken over by Harper and Row in the mid-1980s. The text
of the first Perennial reprint — which also seems to have been
produced using the original Lippincott edition, even though the
chapter titles are centered rather than flushed to the left — followed
the original American text to the letter and the later reprints
continue to do so, with the exception of the introduction of new typos
after two resettings, one in 1999 and the other in 2005. Meanwhile,
the text that continues to be printed in Britain follows the Cape
edition. Consequently, since 1986, the two versions of V. that were
issued between 1963 and 1966 have been available to readers, and as in
1963, the corrected, near definitive edition has only been the British
one, a Vintage paperback in its present manifestation, while those in
the U.S who have been relying on the Perennial imprints, or the newly
released Penguin e-book, have been reading an unauthorized text.

https://pynchon.net/owap/article/view/33/72

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon

https://pynchon.net/owap/index