Skip to main content

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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...
2 comments
Read more

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...
4 comments
Read more