The reason I re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps is that I was missing one of the 5 Richard Hannay stories and I was able to buy all of them in a single-volume Wordsworth edition for £2, which is what it would have cost to buy just The Three Hostages on its own.
I was so surprised at how little I remembered of the ‘real’ 39 Steps story that I compared the complete version with the single-story version and found out something interesting. In the single story edition, the bad guy at the end talks about “der Boot”. But it’s “das Boot” in the Wordsworth edition; and anyone who watched the submarine series on TV knows that’s the right grammar. Which leaves me wondering where J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. got their wrong version of the text, and why there was a wrong version of the book floating about in the first place.
p.s. There’s also a chunk of text missing from Greenmantle in the Wordsworth 5-volume book but it’s there in the Wordsworth single-story book. How did they manage that?
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