Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 04 Fall 1986

              The Santayana Edition
Persons and Places, volume one of The Works of George Santayana, will be
published by the end of 1986. Already several leading periodicals have
asked for page proofs in order to review the book, and there is serious
consideration of the volume becoming an option on one of the national
subscription lists. The Committee on Scholarly Editions (Modern
Language Association of America) has awarded its seal of "An Approved
Edition" for the volume. This seal highlights the editorial rigor associated
with the volume, indicating that the editorial principles and practices
correspond with the high standards of modern textual scholarship. As the
first volume of our edition, Persons and Places not only manifests the need
for editing the full literary corpus of Santayana, but it also presents a text
that distinctly required critical editorial work. I estimate there are
approximately seventy to eighty typed pages of text that has not seen the
light of publication until now, and this material represents substantive
information for Santayana scholarship.
William G. Holzberger and I express our gratitude to all persons who
helped in editing Persons and Places. No individual labor would have
sufficed to produce this work, and the consideration and assistance
provided us has been gracious and remarkable.
The achievement of volume one is the result of an uncommon effort
over a long period of time, and it is an accomplishment against
extraordinary odds. No other volume of the edition is likely to pose as
many editorial and publication difficulties. The next two volumes are
fully underway and on schedule for publication. The Sense of Beauty should
be published in late 1987 with its introduction by Arthur Danto
(Columbia University), and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion is
scheduled for publication in 1988 with an introduction by Joel Porte
(Harvard University).
Because of the pressing need for a critical edition of The Last Puritan,
volume four will be Santayana's novel. The General Editor is working
with a producer in New York on the prospects of a PBS production of
the novel that could coincide with the publication of the critical edition.
In addition, we expect to publish the letters of Santayana. Only a few
hundred have ever been published, and William G. Holzberger has now
collected over 2400. The volume of letters will provide significant
material for Santayana scholarship and, because of its size, will be
published in three or four books. (Interestingly, the James edition is now
projecting eight books for their edition of William James' letters.)
One additional note. Jaakko Hintikka and I are proposing a
conference on "Editing Philosophers" to be held in the spring or fall of
1987. Sessions on the following topics will be a part of the conference: (1)
critical discussions of current and recent editing projects involving
philosophical   texts;   (2)   identification   of   major   problems   in   editing