M&D's lost ampersand in the author-info of AtD

Kai Frederik Lorentzen lorentzen at hotmail.de
Thu Sep 20 16:36:29 CDT 2012


Perhaps just a triviality, but I just realized that my AtD hardcover 
(first edition from 2006) has a peculiar mistake regarding the spelling 
of Mason & Dixon. First I thought it's just a typo on the dust jacket, 
but then I found it - "About The Author" - in the actual book itself. 
And two typos in the same case are rather unlikely. Instead of Mason & 
Dixon it says "Mason and Dixon" both times. Is this corrected in later 
editions? It's interesting since the ampersand caught quite some 
interest here as well as in Pyndustry. Me I neither read Samuel Cohen's 
article "Mason & Dixon & the Ampersand" (Twentieth-Century Literature, 
48.3, 2002, pp. 264-291) nor do I know much about ampersands in general, 
but what I do understand is that an ampersand is emphasizing the 
professional aspect of a relation. So while "Mason and Dixon" would put 
the stress on the friendship of Dixon and Mason, the actual title Mason 
& Dixon has the accentuation on their professional relation as 
scientists and surveyors. Well, if Pynchon really changed his mind about 
the title by the time he published AtD, it wouldn't have been for long, 
'cause the correct title - Mason & Dixon - reappears on the dust jacket 
of Inherent Vice. Can anybody shed some light on this?





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