The Persistence of Print: Editing Nostromo for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad

Osborne, Roger

Abstract

The Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo was published in July 2023, the nineteenth volume in a series that stretches back more than thirty years to the first volume, The Secret Agent, published in 1990. The history of this series of editions stretches even further back, revealing the long-lived nature of scholarly editing as a cultural enterprise that persists through the devotion of scholars to an editorial job at hand. While the tightly bound printed volumes might seem the inevitable outcome from an initiative that developed through the 1970s, the potential for digital editions has not been lost on the general editors in charge of the series. It is almost thirty years since Sid Reid, then General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, considered the potential of digital scholarly editions in “Conrad in Print and on Disk”, but, despite the increased use of digital tools and other technologies to support the scholarship behind the print editions, little advance has been made on a digital Conrad. In the wake of the publication of the Cambridge Edition of Nostromo, this paper reflects on the aspirations and caution in Reid’s essay after considering the broader aims of the Cambridge Edition. Such reflection enables interrogation of the tensions between the realities of print and the digital aspirations of Conrad scholars, then and now, supporting an argument that both forms are necessary for archivally-informed Conrad studies to proceed in the twenty-first century.

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Script and Print

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1834-9013

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Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand

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