Pagination Blues

I guess it should have been anticipated. Perhaps the publishers don't have a clue of the importance of the pagination of a gigantic Pynchon novel. Or Pynchon sees the obsessive analysis of his work as a Routinization of Charisma? Whatever the case, the pagination in the current AtD wiki is to have its soft-cover variants and we'll just have to deal.

I just got the news this morning from Dr. Basileios Drolias, proprietor of the Against the Day blog. I haven't yet seen the paperback so don't know how different it is.

I suppose worst-case scenario is that readers who want to take full advantage of this wiki will have to get themselves the original hardback (hmmm ... no, impossible! an economic reason to change the pagination?...) or one of the many contributors will devise a page-conversion equation.

WikiAdmin 08:01, 7 October 2007 (PDT)

Well, let's stop blaming Penguin before we actually have the paperback in our hands. Based on the evidence so far, I do belive that the US paperback will have the same pagination as the first edition: Amazon as well as Penguin's own website state that the paperback runs to 1104 pages. In all likelihood, this page count shouldn't be regarded as the number of numbered pages, but as the total number of pages in the book. Thus, many websites originally listed the page count of the first edition at 1104 pages, and if you include the unnumbered pages of the front and back matter of the first edition, it does in fact run to 1104 pages.

This doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that the US paperback will end up with the stated number of pages. The stated page count of the first edition changed back and forth a number of times in the months leading up to publication, and the page count of the US paperback can still be changed. If it stays at 1104 pages, though, I think it likely that this translates into 1085 numbered pages.

I've also got my hands on a copy of the UK paperback, and it is correct that this edition has a different page count. Amazon.co.uk lists the page count as 1234 pages, but the actual number of numbered pages is 1220 (again, note the difference between the total number of pages and the numbered pages). The good news is that most of the many typos from the first edition have been corrected in this edition. The bad news is that the print is vanishingly small - practically unreadble - and, of course, that the page count differs from the first edition.

So let's hope that the page count of the US paperback remains at 1104/1085, and that the many errors have been corrected here as well. Then we would have a decent standard text from which to proceed.

Torerye 00:48, 9 October 2007 (PDT)