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Barnes and Noble "Collectible Editions" of Sylvia Plath


HarperCollins has teamed up with Barnes and Noble to produce a book in their Collectible Edition Series. The book, as you may have surmised, is by one Sylvia Plath. The book is a combined The Bell Jar and Collected Poems.

Coming in at 688 pages, the cover price is $25. ISBN: 978-0-06-2-97354-2. Bizarrely, when I searched Amazon I saw that the price is double!

The endpapers are a knockout!



This is a book that was dreamed up a long while ago by Ted Hughes. In fact, he wrote an introduction on a proposed edition of a joint Collected Poems and The Bell Jar. I like Hughes' introduction very much and you can find it printed in his Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Many foreign editions of Plath's work have even included both such as Opere (Italian) and Ouevres (French). You can view their covers on A celebration, this is.

This Barnes and Noble edition repeats some of HarperCollins' perversions to Plath's text (which I discuss in "Textual Variation"). It includes the usual Foreword by Frances McCullough and Lois Ames' Afterword (which prints "Mad Girl's Love Song"; and so for the first time that poem appears in a volume with the rest of the poems in Plath's Collected Poems). Additionally, shockingly, "Daddy" appears in the Index for the first time, too. Joyce Carol Oates' well-known essay "Sylvia Plath and the Death Throes of Romanticism" is printed, too.

All links accessed 25 March 2020
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  1. Eva Stenskar16 April, 2020 20:06

    Just got it! And it is beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg18 April, 2020 16:23

    Very glad to hear this, Eva! Happy to know you got the book. I'll probably never read it, but it's nice to have and to look at. ~pks

    ReplyDelete

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