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

[Bekah]

Hmmm…. I've got a 2006 edition but it doesn't say "1st".   It's the 9th printing.   Mason & Dixon is spelled correctly on the "Also by Thomas Pynchon" page.  I don't have the jacket anymore unless it's back there with some stuff behind the books on that shelf - It probably is but I'm not going way up and back there right now.  (lol)

Bekah


On Sep 20, 2012, at 2:36 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

> 
> 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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