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Great pains have been taken to avoid typographical and transcription errors when preparing texts for a Startling Visions Publications volume. These measures include actual proofreading performed by human eyes in addition to the now more common methods of automatic spelling- and grammar-checkers provided by publishing software.
We can't, of course, guarantee
that no transcription errors will creep into the texts despite
our best efforts—human eyes are still, after all, only human
eyes—but readers should be aware that certain instances which
might appear to be errors may in fact be correct reflections of
original source material.
Because a large part of our output is the reprinting many stories that were written and published in times past (many from the 1800s and early to mid-1900s), and not only those which premiered in the United States but also in other English-speaking countries, it's common for the original texts to contain spellings or grammatical structures that are not considered proper by current English standards in the U. S. A.
It's
our intention, however, to present these texts as accurately and
faithfully to their original printings as possible, and
therefore we have retained most of the forms that a modern
editor might possibly cite as being "incorrect". Some particular
examples are described below:
Spellings
Any legitimate variant spellings, such as those from British English, or from older spellings that have passed out of modern usage, have been retained wherever they appeared in an original source publication from which a text is being reprinted.
Some examples would be "centre" instead of "center", "labour" instead of "labor", "realise" instead of "realize", "undistinguishable" instead of "indistinguishable", "to-day" instead of "today", "leapt" instead of "leaped", etc.
In any case where an original form or spelling uses an alternate convention so different from modern American English that it is almost unrecognizable, the modern form of the word will often appear in brackets next to the spelling that appeared in the original text.
Whenever an obvious typographical error (such as "sowrd" instead of "sword") occurred in an original source text, such an obvious original error is corrected.
Phonetic spellings of dialectical pronunciations (meaning words spelled to represent the way a person of a particular dialect would pronounce them), such as "p'r'aps" for "perhaps", "De'il" for "Devil", are always reproduced as they originally appeared in a source text.
Punctuation
Original punctuation is usually retained from source texts. Any punctuation additions, deletions, or other alterations have only been allowed for in instances wherein the original punctuation is considered to actually hinder proper understanding of a sentence's structure by modern readers.
Abbreviations
Any commonly recognized abbreviations appearing in the original source texts have been maintained. These include standardized abbreviations like "AM" and "PM" for time of day, as well as non-standardized conventions such as "&c" for "etc.", and so on.
Paragraphs
The original separation of paragraphs, including when and where passages of character dialog are and are not separated into new paragraphs from the main body of narrative text, are preserved from their first printed appearances, unless the original form is perceived to introduce an element of ambiguity that adds a needless impediment to comprehension for modern readers.
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