LE MORTE D'ARTHUR : Volume I

The Norton Critical Edition edition by Stephen Shepherd makes for an ideal presentation of Malory, one that strongly evokes the experience of reading the original Winchester manuscript, but at the same time gives plenty of help for the modern reader. Introduction, explanatory notes and glossary are finely judged. Note that this edition is in original spelling and is unabridged: a lower degree of difficulty can be found in Helen Cooper's abridged, modern-spelling edition (Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World's Classics)).

The editor expresses some hesitation (p. xii) over the decision to break the text up into modern paragraphs, and not simply to reproduce the manuscript's placement of paragraph symbols in unbroken text. It's not a big issue, but I for one would have found this method attractive, the bold paragraph symbols (as I imagine) breaking up the text adequately and giving an even more distinctive, manuscript-like feel to it.

The only thing that slightly detracts from the book for me is the typesetting of the verso pages (the left-hand pages of each opening), which goes against traditional practice. Since the text is prose, set justified left and right, the marginal annotations of the left-hand pages could easily have been placed in the outer margin, in a mirror image of the right-hand pages. As it is there is a stark, mostly empty space along the inner edge of the left page, while the text comes to within a few millimetres of the outer edge, disturbing to the eye and leaving no thumb-room. Poetry has to be set this way, of course, with its ragged right edge - and in any case the narrower columns of text are easier to keep clear of the page's edge. But if this is Norton house style for prose, I can't see why it's necessary.