On 15 November a presentation of the new ‘Historical-Critical Edition’ of Franz Kafka’s writings will take place at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, followed by a panel (and open) discussion. On display will be some of the manuscripts concerned. The occasion is convened by the Bodleian Library, which has key holdings of Kafka manuscripts. The edition itself is edited by Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle of the Institut für Textkritik at Heidelberg. For details of the event, see here and here.

Four of the volumes that have appeared so far (each ‘volume’ is made up of the number of books needed to represent the text concerned). At present the edition is expected to run to about 25 volumes.

The essential method of the edition: a page of manuscript is shown as a photograph; on the facing page, all the text is transcribed, and so are all the significant marks that affect the text.

We hope to write more here, in due course, about the editorial-typographic approach of the ITK and about the work of its publisher Stroemfeld Verlag.