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Saturday, January 19, 2019

Bobby Campbell on editing RAW's prose


Hilaritas Press is doing its best to copyedit Robert Anton Wilson's works as it issues new editions, but that's not always easy, as Bobby Campbell explains.

4 comments:

Pelle Lindhe (PL1370) said...

Talking about new editions, is the world yet aware that Illuminatus! will be published in swedish this fall?

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

This is news to me! Can you tell me more?

supergee said...

The excerpt Bobby Campbell mentioned looks good as it is, but I wonder about some other RAW spellings, such as "exercize."

Rasa said...

That "exercize" vs "exercise" issue has bugged me since we published Prometheus Rising, which Bob filled with "Exercizes." In Cosmic Trigger and Quantum Psychology, he spells it "exercises," so it was rather vexing to have the word used extensively in PR with the "z." (BTW, in Email to the Universe, he uses both spellings, but that's essays from different time periods, so . . .)

It's considered American English in some circles, so in the end we decided to leave it the way New Falcon originally had it, with the "z."

I think Bob would have "fixed" the "z" over the 24 printings of PR if he wanted to. New Falcon was not great in fixing typos, but because PR only uses the "z" variation, I have to think it was deliberate. Why? Good question.

Here's an informative "British vs American English" page from a German website:

https://www.learnenglish.de/mistakes/isevsize.html

Reference pages like this really tempted us to "correct" Bob's spelling, but in the end we decided to leave it.

By the way, nice post from Bobby! I love his portrait of Maria.