This note explains differences between the electronic version of What Is Man? (2025) and the printed version (1973).
The notes reporting emendations and historical collations in this electronic version differ from those in the printed volume. The following note reports a rejected variant reading for the date at the bottom of the “Preface” for Christian Science. The accepted reading (or lemma) is on the left, and the rejected variant reading is on the right:
“†215.13 January, 1907 A March, 1903 PC”
The same note appears as follows in this electronic version:
“January, 1907 (A) • March, 1903 (PC)”
The electronic version brings the formatting of the note into conformity with the formatting of notes in later volumes of the Mark Twain Project edition of works. It also clarifies the information conveyed by the note: the “A” and “PC” are inside parentheses because they are not parts of the author’s text but are the abbreviations used for the copy text (in this case, “A” for the “1907 edition”) and the rejected variant witness (in this case, “PC” for the typescript used as printer’s copy). The bullet between the lemma and the rejected reading marks the difference between the lemma and the rejected reading.
The list of notes for emendations and historical collation have separate headnotes. The headnotes in the printed version of What Is Man? state: “A dagger (†) precedes entries which are discussed in Notes, above.” The “Notes” referred to in this case are the “Textual Notes.” The design of the electronic edition obviates the need for the dagger: all notes (textual notes, emendations, and notes from the historical collation) are linked to icons (i.e., Ⓐ) in the text. The editors therefore have not perpetuated the use of the dagger symbol in the electronic version of What Is Man?, and the sentence describing it has been left out of the headnotes for the lists of emendations and the historical collation.
In the printed volume of What Is Man?, the separate lists of notes for emendations of the copy-text and the historical collation are divided into segments based on available segments of the work used for collation. For the “Preface” of Christian Science, for instance, the editors used the manuscript, the typescript prepared for the printer, and the 1907 edition; for chapters 1-4, however, the editors used the manuscript, the Cosmopolitan printing, the printer’s copy with holograph revisions, the version of the chapters published in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, and the 1907 edition. The original editor of What Is Man? created subheadings in the emendation and collation lists stating what ensemble of source texts were consulted for each section of the lists. We have not perpetuated these subheadings because the relevant source texts are identified by the sigla between parentheses in the individual entries (i.e., “A,” “PC,” and so on).
The textual commentary for What Is Man? and Christian Science include prefatory notes describing the emendation lists and historical collation lists. The reader will find these prefatory notes at the end of the “Headnote” for the relevant work and not at the beginning of the emendation and collation lists for that work.