[Milton-L] Ordering classroom editions

[Carol Barton]

Neither am I advocating the purchase of substandard books--in any venue--just to keep costs down (it seems to me that in that case in particular, "what's cheap is dear"). Back in the day, I bought Hughes twice--once brand new, and once well-used by a student with whom I was very familiar: myself! (The text was stolen from me during a class break, and when it resurfaced at the bookstore, they had the temerity to charge me the used book price to retrieve it--even though my name and address were printed inside the cover.) I think most students are willing to do what they can to buy "the best" in the field of their major--and like Rose, I still have all of my undergraduate literary texts.  But it's unrealistic to think that they can afford to do that in all of their classes--and if you're teaching undeclared freshmen and sophomores, I think that's something you have to factor in, too.

I know it's not the best approach in the classroom environment (because of differences in page numbering, etc.) but what I tried to do in survey courses was to identify one text as preferable, and offer another (of good quality, but not as pricey) as an alternative--reminding the students, always, that they were free to purchase used books if they liked, either at the school, or via the Internet (especially after I found out, to my disgust, that our bookstore was surreptitiously tacking on a 20% "handling fee" to the prices of new books!). That discovery came when, for a class in Modern Literature, I ordered the anniversary edition of Baum's The Wizard of Oz, which was beautiful but already costly, only to see it in the bookstore for considerably more than what I knew the acquisition price to be. 

As an example of what I'm talking about, when using Norton anthologies, I've sometimes ordered the newest, but permitted them to use the previous edition, as long as they understood that this text or that had been dropped or added, and that they would have to obtain a copy of the missing item(s) elsewhere. That was far preferable to finding out, as I did just before the midterm one semester, that some of them who always seemed to be "forgetting" to bring the book to class had never in fact purchased it at all!

Idealism rarely emerges victorious from a battle with cold, hard economic reality.

Best to all,

Carol Barton
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