Appetitive: A Rant on Editions and Revisions

I thought there were supposed to be laws against false advertising. I was given a book I really wanted for the holidays, Nicole Loraux's The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, so you might wonder why I am grumbling. As it turns out, this is an abridged version, but no where on the outside of the volume does it account for this fact.

It was not until I began reading Loraux's book that I realized the problem. The preface to the second edition refers to it in the early paragraphs as "abridged" and as "a shorter version. then, but not a rewritten version" (Loraux 15). The back of the book contradicts her statement, claiming that "this new edition of The Invention of Athens includes Loraux's significant revisions undertaken in 1993 to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists." "Significant revisions" vs. "not a rewritten version" seems contradictory to me. Furthermore, the titles are exactly the same:The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City vs. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. The first one in that series is the new 2006 edition with the "revisions," i.e. cutting out a lot of stuff that might be really useful to me, and the second is the old 1986 edition.

In my opinion, if it's abridged, call it abridged. If you think it will sell less copies than do not abridge it in the first place!!!

The abridged version--2006 (539 pages).

As a note: I love the book. There is no reason to suppose it was abridged. I wish there was a way to hold publishers accountable for problems like this.