Peter Robins emailed through the following, in response to my post on “extra features” in literature, yesterday – Pete Hoskin
Eighteenth-century authors were deep into this sort of thing. Pope was continually reissuing the Dunciad with extras to adapt it to his latest enemies: a new fourth book, a complete set of fake scholarly apparatus. (There are editions with real scholarly notes on Pope’s fake scholarly notes, and real notes of textual variations next to his fake ones.) Something similar happened with Swift’s first major work, A Tale of a Tub – he sliced up unfavourable responses and turned them into deliberately foolish annotations to the next edition.
Some other random ones:
Joe Gould’s Secret, by Joseph Mitchell, a classic of American non-fiction, is all a sort of DVD extra to a New Yorker article called ‘Professor Seagull’.
Max Beerbohm reissued his short story collection Seven Men with two bonus stories – one of them, ‘Savonarola Brown’, among the best things in it – under the title ‘Seven Men and Two Others’.
Alastair Gray books arrive in the world festooned in extras – I can’t remember exactly how many plot twists are hidden in the notes of Poor Things – including artwork underneath the boards of the hardbacks.
There’s also quite a good ‘deleted scenes’ case: A Clockwork Orange, of which the original paperback omitted the final chapter, so as to match the US edition and the Kubrick film. The Penguin Modern Classics version restored what was missing, as did Burgess’s deeply strange stage-musical version, which also features a touch of live DVD commentary: a Kubrick lookalike being kicked off stage to a mixture of Beethoven and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.
And there’s an argument that the second quarto of Hamlet was an attempt to see off a pirate DVD (the first, ‘bad’ quarto) by adding a bunch of bonus material. This would mean that some of the most famous dramatic speeches in English were DVD extras.
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