This series has come up on another thread somewhere but I can't find it. I said that I didn't have any but wanted some. Now I've picked up a few (thankfully, used) but I can't remember if I said anything about it. I haven't read any of them yet (and, indeed, have read very little except Crane in any edition), so I can't address quality of proofreading or anything, as essential as that is.
None of mine have dustjackets; all have nifty insewn bookmarks. I have
the Stephen Crane (1984, green covers, no slipcase, first printing),
the two Hawthorne volumes (1983-4, red covers, white slipcases, sixth and eighth printings) and
the two Welty volumes (1998, blue covers, white slipcases, first printings). Other than the cover colors changing and the attribution of distributor being changed from the irony of Viking to the more apparent irony of Penguin, they don't seem to have changed over those years.
Everything about them seems designed for minimizing size, which has its pros and cons. They don't take up much shelfspace. The covers seem nice, but thin. The paper seems very nice (and seems to have sewn signatures like a real hardcover rather than a glued block like today's usual hardcovers), yet almost onion-skin-like, which makes it very easy for them to get "bubbles" or creases. But even the oldest is bright and white with good contrast and the type looks good. Also, there are nice chronologies, notes on the text, general notes, and sometimes other features but they are quite minimal. There are no big essays/introductions or anything like that. But all this is perhaps to make a sort of minimal "complete works" of an author in one or two volumes take up about the space of one or two ordinary volumes: five novels or five collections or the like per volume in many cases.
Also a pro or con: while I do
not want excessive editorial interference, I believe that, when authors wrote what they wrote, the ink was not dry and they were conscious of themselves and their work as fully modern. So I think the "expressive flavor of the archaic" is nonsensical and spelling and mechanics should be modernized and regularized as far as can be done without actually altering anything deeper in the work so that they can be as modern to us as they were to themselves. My LoA volumes (and presumably most or all LoA volumes) seem to take the opposite approach, with minimal editing, drawn from recent (relative to the book's publication) scholarly texts (which naturally preserve archaisms) where available (Virginia, Ohio State, etc.).
Lastly, they are awfully expensive - not if you're used to buying ordinary crappy hardcovers and you consider you're getting better made books with vastly more content, but just given the pure dollar figure (30 bucks or so).
Oh, and (almost) like VS, I have copies of everything in the LoA 50s SF set (and have read all but the Brackett (ironically, the only Brackett I
haven't read) and the Matheson (though I picked up the Matheson
because of the LoA set)) and the same applies to some other LoA volumes. Overall, I kind of like the LoA selections: it's mostly the stolid conventional canon and quite respectable but they're not so stiff they can't bend and print some SF and crime and whatnot. So I think it's nicely "progressively conservative," so to speak. I'm sure they're missing somebody essential and have included somebody terrible, but that would be true of anything.
