We’ll soon make a proper announcement about our first fiction title under our JY&A Media imprint: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I was drawn to this title, more than any other that had recently entered the public domain.
This one has a difference: we’ve restored all of Hemingway’s words, so it appears as he intended. His story’s original appearance in Scribner’s Magazine had many edits to the text, and the eventual 1929 publication in novel form restored many of them, but not the strongest language.
This version has the adult language back in there, which Hemingway envisaged. However, there is one racist word in there which I had to wrestle with, and consequently I wrote a foreword to discuss anti-racism theory and lived experience.
I concluded there:
This will no doubt be one of many new editions of A Farewell to Arms, if the numerous (and, in many cases, poor) versions of The Great Gatsby were anything to go by when that title entered the public domain in 2021. If there are to be many of A Farewell to Arms, then maybe this one should exist, asking some of the tougher questions directly.
Scans of the original do exist, from which we did an OCR, then meticulously compared that output with known texts. The censored words came from Books on Trial, and they were all judged to be appropriate in the context: e.g. ‘F*** the war.’ Everything was professionally designed and typeset, ridding it of orphans and widows, and put into our house style (though with some quaint spellings used by Hemingway intact). An appropriate cover image was selected, though a number of approaches were considered. (“AI”, incidentally, was never an option. I actually found a terrible “AI” cover for The Sun Also Rises, which makes you wonder how bad the inside must look.)
We even re-kerned some pairs in the text: that’s how finicky the typesetting got.
Then there are all the technical pre-press things you do to get a book ready.
I wanted to have a fiction title in our range, though I am happy at how the non-fiction ones are going. We will have more this year as we gradually expand our line-up. We’ll mostly stick with non-fiction, which is our strength, but I’m prepared to be surprised.