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My Ántonia
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minor correction and question about description
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Ann
(last edited Jul 02, 2013 11:16AM)
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Jul 02, 2013 11:15AM
I recently added the Project Gutenberg [PG] edition of this book, which is the one I read. This edition did not have an accent mark in the title. I later discovered that the original (1918) title did have the accent mark, so I tried correct the ORIGINAL title in my entry. But somehow the accent ended up in the wrong place. It should be in the original (1918) title, not in the PG title. Minor point, but easy to fix, I hope. Also, is it OK to copy the book description from some other edition into this entry? I didn't do this, but I think it would be helpful to readers. The PG edition contains the introductory text that I gather was omitted from some of the later editions, so if you copy a description, it should be one that includes this. Should I do this myself, or is it something that a librarian would need to do?
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A librarian would need to do it. I combined your edition with all the others, so it now has the default description.It is generally OK to copy a book description from another edition, as long as everything matches (sometimes a description will refer to an editor/illustrator/translator etc. specific to that edition and no other edition).
As for the accent in the title, I think for consistency's sake you want each title to be identical. Every edition should have the accent in the same place, unless at some point Cather decided she wanted the accent gone. Isn't Project Gutenberg the publisher where volunteers type in the text - so a missing accent would be a typo?
Thanks! I'm pretty sure volunteers do not retype the text in Project Gutenberg. It's all done with OCR scans but edited by very conscientious humans. I find that free PG books have far fewer errors than most e-books I've paid for. Because the author makes a point of saying that the name Ántonia is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, she probably intended the accent to be there too. But several editions on Goodreads did not have the accent mark. Anyway, combining books descriptions makes sense.
