Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: A Critical Edition

Textual Variants in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

A Note on the Text and Presentation of the Variants

The text presented in this view tracks variants between the Harper’s Bazar magazine and Boni & Liveright book editions of the novel that appeared in 1925. This presentation excludes the Ralph Barton images to focus on textual variants. Readers interested in the variations between the images in the two editions should refer to the “Visual Variants in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” section.

The presentation tracks all variations in language, spelling, capitalization, and paragraph breaks. The following conventions are used to mark up the variants in the text:
  1. Text that is not highlighted is common to both versions of the text. The Harper’s Bazar text is on the left, whereas the Boni & Liveright text is on the right.
  2. Text highlighted in yellow is unique to the version of the text in that column. This includes cases where text was simply removed or added, and cases where text was replaced. In cases where a single punctuation mark was added or deleted between published versions of the novel, the adjoining word is typically added to the highlighted text in order to ensure visibility.
  3. Text that was moved between the two editions is highlighted in blue. Single words or short phrases were typically only considered to be moved if they stayed within the same sentence.
  4. In cases where a paragraph break was added or (less commonly) removed for the Boni & Liveright edition, a pilcrow symbol is included and highlighted in blue, and the paragraph break is represented as it existed for the text represented in that column. Therefore, where a pilcrow appears between sentences of the same paragraph, it indicates a paragraph break that exists in the opposing variant.
Each of the six chapters is presented on a page with the magazine text on the left and Boni & Liveright text on the right. At the bottom, the reader may choose to continue to the next chapter in the current mode or choose to switch to the reading view of the novel that includes images. At the end of the final chapter of the variants, the reader will proceed to a presentation of visual variants between the two versions.

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