I once received two separate gifts of the novel Moby Dick. These two editions of the novel sat happily on my shelf for a number of years before I finally picked one of them up to read for the first time. I selected as my reading copy the Oxford World’s Classics edition, a hardback with the nice dustjacket and the prestigious imprimatur of the Oxford University Press.
The less-prestigious paperback Wordsworth Classics edition sat on the shelf.
So I read Moby Dick, and I enjoyed it a great deal, and when I came to the end I thought, well, what an ending! And then I thought – hang on, what about Ishmael? Moby Dick’s opening, Call me Ishmael, is among the most renowned in literature. Surely the novel couldn’t end with Ishmael from the first line going unmentioned for the last hundred pages!
Luckily, I had my Wordsworth Classics edition to hand, and I pulled it out and found that the prestigious OUP had somehow managed to omit the last part of the book. They forgot to put the ending in. Whoops.
All of which demonstrates two valuable lessons which we can henceforth generalise into everyday life and apply to our every endeavour:
(1) you can judge a book by its cover (the Wordsworth said ‘complete and unabridged’ on the front, and the OUP did not)
(2) sometimes insignificant differences turn out to be quite significant after all.
For those also in possession of the OUP edition, I reproduce the omitted section below the jump.