A Guide to Documentary Editing

For more than twenty years, A Guide to Documentary Editing has proven an invaluable tool for scholarly editors, editors-in-training, readers of documentary editions, and other students of American history and literature. This new, extensively revised edition of the Guide arrives in the midst of great change in the field. In addition to exploring fully the increasingly central role electronic technology plays in the editing process, this edition provides the most current treatment of the craft’s fundamental issues. These include locating and collecting sources, transcribing source texts, conventions of textual treatment, dealing with nontextual elements, and preparing editions for publishers. The documentary-editing environment is more vibrant than ever, and the authors draw on this wealth of activity to include numerous examples of the Guide’s principles in practice.

The most innovative aspect of this latest edition of the Guide is a new digital component. Users may access the entire contents online through a dedicated Web site. In addition to offering the convenience of easy online access, this Web edition will include hyperlinks to relevant literature and will act as an archive for material from earlier editions. Most important, it will be periodically revised and updated, to ensure a Guide that is always current with best practice. The online edition is available at http://gde.upress.virginia.edu.

Each edition of the Guide has become the standard text for scholarly editors, whether their focus is correspondence, journals, diaries, financial records, professional papers, or unpublished manuscripts. This print/digital edition presents this essential guide in its most dynamic and useful form yet.

Published in association with the Association for Documentary Editing

Mary-Jo Kline, author of the two previous editions of A Guide to Documentary Editing, has served as Associate Editor of The Papers of John Jay and The Papers of John Adams and Editor of The Papers of Aaron Burr. Susan H. Perdue has served as a research assistant at The Papers of James Madison, Associate Editor at The Papers of John Marshall, and is currently Senior Associate Editor at The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series.