It was recently pointed out to me by Chris Simpson that the pseudonymous authorship of Kierkegaard only consists of roughly 45% of his total writings, whereas the other 55% were signed/”religious”. With that said, it is exciting to discover that some of the harder-to-find Princeton editions of Kierkegaard’s work consisting of this signed authorship–previously only available in hardcover and therefore cost-prohibitavely expensive–are soon coming out in paperback! These volumes tend to be ignored in the popular scholarship on Kierkegaard, but these works, along with his Journals and Papers, are essential for any Kierkegaard scholar.
Looking at the paperback column below, these are clearly more affordably priced, although some are still a bit pricey. Those ones tend to be the larger volumes over 500-700 pages or so (e.g. The Moment and Later Writings), but there may be exceptions.
Here’s a breakdown with a price comparison chart where the paperback prices listed are the pre-order prices from Amazon. Hopefully it’s not too confusing. That being said, those viewing this post in an RSS reader like Google Reader, Netvibes, etc., may way to view this post on the blog itself because the styles may get munged.
* Items designated with an asterisk mean that Amazon only has them “used and new from [x price]“, indicating that they don’t have any in stock and used bookstores or individual resellers are trying to scalp them at usually batshit crazy insane prices (e.g. The Corsair Affair).
† The Princeton site for Kierkegaard’s works only lists a release date in “Month Year” format whereas Amazon has more specific dates that don’t always align with these dates. The format will be “[Princeton Date] / [Amazon Date]“. We all know that Amazon’s release dates don’t really signify anything real, so take these with a grain of salt.
‡ Hardcover prices with two prices listed are for the “[New Price] / [Used Price]” where the used price is the best price available in the Amazon Marketplace.
Thanks for that. Very exciting.
Thanks for posting this, exciting stuff. Especially ‘my point of view’. such an important, and terribly hard to get a hold of, text.
This is awesome. The question must be asked of Princeton, of course: Why wait this long?! This is still better than never of course, but still…. Regardless of my long-lasting grudge against Princeton University Press, I am happy now.
Mike, yeah, thankfully our library here has all of SK’s works, which is nice, but I know for a fact that my undergrad/MA university didn’t have these other ones.
Dave, yeah, it’s pretty infuriating! I know for a fact that publishers will print both hardcover and paperback at the same time and wait 12-18 months before releasing the paperbacks, letting them sit in the warehouse while they make money off the hardcovers first to libraries, etc., first. It would seem to make sense from a printing perspective to just get them both tooled up at once since the pagination is the same, it’s just the binding process that is different. But in this case, I can’t imagine why on earth they would wait so incredibly long, unless they are planning to update them in any significantly helpful way, which I’m pretty sure is not the case. Not to mention the fact that some of this stuff is so damn important, not to mention insanely fun to read when he gets extremely polemical against the ‘present age’ at the end of his life.
Other than that, were the other reasons that Princeton elicited a grudge?
Oh, no, just the Kierkegaard stuff….I actually don’t read or own a lot of that Princeton publishes other than Kierkegaard!