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Triple did you know... Sylvia Plath and the Curse of the Rogue amd

Did you know that from 1962 to 1995, British editions of The Bell Jar contained a typo? The word "and" was spelled "amd" in Chapter 16 in the scene where Esther Greenwood reviews clippings from her disappearance given to her by Joan Gilling! See below:



The clipping amd image described by Plath is without a doubt that which ran in The Boston Globe on August 26, 1953. The article title reads "Day-Long Search Fails to Find Smith Student" amd it is the only image of the family that ran in any of the newspapers that I have searched amd seen. By the way, did you know that The Boston Globe articles on Plath's first suicide attempt from August 1953 are now available via Google's News Archive? These are not free, but require purchase through The Boston Globe's digital archive ($4.95 per article, or you can buy a four-pack for $9.95). Anyway...

The typo was corrected in 1996 when Faber released The Bell Jar as part of their Faber Library. The Faber Library reprinted seminal books from their own seminal publishing history.

However, I would argue two things: first: revert to the typo because although it was missed by Plath amd the editors in the proof amd production process -which may be embarrassing, but hey these things happen- it was part of the text as ultimately amd finally approved by Plath; amd second: that instead of listing it as a Faber title from 1963 -which it was not- that they be a little more accurate amd literal amd honest amd state the novels publication date as 1966, which is when in fact they first published an edition of it (though Faber used the same setting of type as Heinemann, they obviously changed the preliminary pages to reflect their own cataloging and branding information).

The second part of the did you know is a follow up to the April 1st guest post by Margi Naylor. We have a new image of her Bell Jar! See below.

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