How our editions work
Here's exactly what you get.
Every Reader's Companion Edition is built the same way: the book itself, never a retelling or a summary, with four things around it that do the looking-up for you. Here they are, on real pages from our books. Tap a page to see it full size.
1. A note before every chapter
A minute's reading before the chapter starts. It tells you where you are, who's there and what to watch for. A note may say what happens in its own chapter, but it never tells what happens in a later one, and it never sits inside the text.
Dangerous Liaisons, Letter IX
Reader's note Madame de Volanges replies with alarm. She warns her young friend that Valmont never says a word without a wicked purpose, that he chooses women as his victims, and that being seen alone with him could ruin her reputation. She advises her to get him sent away, or else to leave. Her warning is shrewd, yet the one woman she praises for having resisted him is the Marquise de Merteuil. Laclos's footnote spells out the irony. She also reports that Gercourt's regiment is ordered to Corsica, postponing the wedding until winter.
In a novel told in 175 letters, the note says who is writing, to whom and what they're really after. Some send you back to an earlier letter so you can lay two accounts of the same days side by side and catch the lie.
Dracula, Chapter I
Reader's note Jonathan Harker's journal, 3–5 May: by train from Munich through Vienna and Buda-Pesth to Bistritz, then by coach to the Borgo Pass and by carriage to a castle in the mountains. A young Englishman on business writes partly for his Mina, noting dishes, costumes and customs. Watch the mood change once local people learn where he is going: the frightened landlord and his wife, the crucifix pressed on him, the eve of St. George's Day, the words he looks up in his dictionary. Harker calls it all "very ridiculous" yet admits in the same breath that he does not feel comfortable, and by the end of the night ride he is plainly afraid. Keep an eye on the Count's driver, too: his grip, his eyes, the blue flames, and the way the wolves behave around him.
Dracula is told in journals, letters, telegrams, newspaper cuttings, a ship's log and a diary spoken into a phonograph. The note before each of its 27 chapters tells you whose papers you're in and which dates, so you never flip back to work out where you are. Notice that it says how the chapter goes, and stops there.
2. A who's who
Printed before the story starts, so you can meet the cast first or look someone up when a name comes back. Entries introduce people as you first meet them: who they are and how they fit in.
- Jonathan Harker
- A young Englishman from Exeter, just qualified as a solicitor, sent by his employer Mr. Hawkins to Transylvania to settle Count Dracula's purchase of a London estate. His journal, kept in shorthand, opens the book.
- Count Dracula
- A Transylvanian noble who has bought an old estate near London and is eager to learn English ways: a tall old man with a long white moustache, dressed all in black, courtly and learned, with an ice-cold hand and great strength. Harker never sees him eat or drink, and he keeps to the night.
- The Marquise de Merteuil Dangerous Liaisons
- A widow of Paris society, respected by her friends and related to Madame de Volanges, who privately plots with her former lover Valmont. Witty, commanding, and coldly strategic, she wants revenge on the Comte de Gercourt, who once left her for another woman.
3. A glossary
The words that changed meaning, the money, the food, the slang and the customs, in plain English. From over 100 terms in our shortest books to over 500 in Poe, Sleepy Hollow and Jekyll and Hyde.
- paprika hendl
- Chicken cooked with paprika, the red pepper that flavors much Hungarian cooking. Dracula
- toilet
- In Victorian usage, washing, dressing and grooming; a "toilet glass" is a mirror for a dressing table. Dracula
- Kodak
- The small, easy-to-use hand camera introduced by George Eastman in 1888. Dracula
- belly-timber
- Food; "I lack belly-timber sairly" means "I sorely want my supper." Dracula
- louis
- The louis d'or, a French gold coin worth twenty-four livres. Valmont's ten louis came to far more than the family's debt of fifty-six livres. Dangerous Liaisons
4. An introduction for today's reader
Not a lecture: the story behind the book, and the few things that make it easier to enjoy. Dracula's introduction has six sections: The Man Behind the Book, How the Book Was Made, A Name from History, A Very Modern Novel, How to Read It and About This Text. That's where you learn that Stoker found the name in a Whitby library in the summer of 1890, in a book published in 1820, and that his working title was The Un-Dead.
Dangerous Liaisons has "How to Read a Novel in Letters": five habits (check the heading, ask what each writer is hiding, watch the dates, read the footnotes, listen to the voices) that turn a book people give up on into one they can't put down.
5. The book itself
Everything else is built around the one thing we never rewrite: the book itself, never a retelling or a summary. Each book prints its text from a named early edition, usually the first: Dracula as Stoker published it in May 1897, Frankenstein as it first appeared in 1818, Pride and Prejudice from the first edition of 1813. A book first written in French comes in a named English translation: Dangerous Liaisons in Richard Aldington's of 1924, The Phantom of the Opera in the first English translation of 1911. The Note on the Text in each book names the edition and how the text was checked; Dracula's was corrected word by word against a copy of the 1897 first edition.
The notes stand before each chapter, never inside it, so nothing interrupts the text. Each book's page says exactly what it holds, down to the edition or translation it follows.
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