For this assignment, I was a bit sad to find that I didn’t actually bring the one book I really wanted to talk about, which was a little known novel titled We by Russian writer Yevegeny Zamyatin. Somehow, in my cloudy, collegiate brain I didn’t think to bring this one little book, a book that I fell in love with and read nearly from cover to cover despite my particularly bad habit of so rarely reading, just because I had filed it away under, “finished” and therefore unimportant. So for this particular assignment, I took a look at my sadly underpopulated bookcase and scanned for another book I could claim that I read in its entirety and lo and behold after some deliberation, I found it; my copy of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the 1818 original text version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.

Now, from what I know, the book is roughly eight inches in height, about an inch in thickness, and about five inches in width. Like all Oxford World’s Classics books, this particular version of Frankenstein sports a smooth, almost stone-like cover that seemingly has a layer of “new” dust to it, the kind of dust that comes with completely new books like a preservative to keep the pages semi-white. Along the front cover, the book sports the OWC’s usual conventions for their brand of books; a picture designed the represent the core theme of the novel along with a white strip near the bottom of the cover that sits against the picture that contains the title, author, edition and finally the OWC’s brand name. The picture on the front cover is an oddly grotesque painting of the Creature from the novel and what’s so immediately striking about it is the somehow cartoonishly large eyes that the Creature sports which give him a somewhat sassy look to him.

Like most books in my possession, I tend to try and keep all the pages straight and unblemished, the cover and corners unbent, and the spine straight. For this particular copy I own, all of those requirements have been met despite the fact that I brought this book to two separate classes nearly four days a week. I bought this book new and for the most part, it still looks new, which I take an odd amount of pride and satisfaction in.

The actual blood and bones of the book are fairly simple; OWC’s usually scoops up the rights to a pretty wide swath of novels ranging from antiquity to the early twentieth century and they typically include an index of important references, footnotes and other bibliographical information as well as a history section documenting a particular book’s publication process and relevant history about the author’s life and colleagues. In any case, this version of Frankenstein is, like I mentioned previously, the 1818 unrevised text version of the novel. Mary Shelley, who authored two versions of the novel, the initial and widely regarded to be “superior” version of the text and a later revised version published in 1831 at the behest of her publishers Richard Bentley and Henry Colburn to be a tad more conservative and truncated. While I have but little knowledge of the 1831 version of the novel, as I’ve only read and owned the 1818 version, I can understand why the novel was toned down. When Mary Shelley was in the process of writing the story on her famed vacation at the Villa Diodati with her husband Percy, step-sister Claire, their friend Lord Byron, and his physician John Polidori, the impetus for which was both a terribly cold climate affecting much of the populated world, (known as the “Year Without a Summer”) as well as a challenge by Byron to write a “ghost” story, Mary fashioned what was ostensibly conceived to be a horror story from the very beginning and as a result, the book contained themes of sublime isolation, terrible, murderous weather and of course, a monster so closely resembling man that much of the novel is spent uncovering what it is to be human. Though it’s a bit difficult to understand why a book like this would be scary, the subject matter of the book is somewhat grotesque and unsettling and therefore it’s easy to understand why someone would want the content to be toned down.

In any case, I just have a weird connection this book. I read it in highschool and liked it but didn’t “get” it, and I knew that I’d have to read it some time in college, which luckily I did. And you know what? I actually took the time to sit and read its relatively brief 191 pages and came to find that I really enjoyed it.