A Tale Of Two Editions

Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (Sphere Books, London, 1977):

is described on the cover as "SF CLASSIC No. 12";

opens with an explanatory article, "A CHANGELING IN ELFLAND" by Lin Carter, Editorial Consultant: The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series;

has a FOREWORD by the author in which he explains that, for this second edition of a novel written twenty or so years previously, he has trimmed away a lot of adjectives and other unnecessary words, corrected errors and inconsistencies and, in one scene, substituted one Person for another.

For images of the front and back covers of this edition, see an earlier post named after Lin Carter's article here.

Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword (Gollancz/Orion, London, 2014):

is, according to it its cover, one of a number of "FANTASY MASTERWORKS";

has an INTRODUCTION by Michael Dirda which states that this edition reprints the unrevised 1954 text;

has an AFTERWORD by the author which partly reproduces the text of the FOREWORD of the Sphere edition.

For the front cover of this edition, see the image attached to this post.

Reading the opening pages of the texts of both of these editions confirms that adjectives have been trimmed away in the Sphere edition although not in the Gollancz/Orion edition. However, when Anderson wrote of substituting one Person for another, I took him to refer to a scene in the Sphere edition where the Devil turns out to have been Odin disguised. But Dirda's INTRODUCTION to the Gollancz/Orion edition quotes this scene, with the departing Devil resembling Odin, as occurring in this edition. I have not yet looked any further into this matter.

My copy of the Sphere edition is falling apart so I got my technical assistant, Ketlan, to check Amazon and thus we acquired the Gollancz/Orion edition which is gratifyingly recent. Amazon informed Ketlan that the book was not available from many sources so my advice to anyone who needs copies of Anderson's works is to check their availability without delay.