A "Preliminary Throat Clearings" front-matter section…

This is material that was cut: present in a draft, absent from the published novel.

In the manuscript. In the "First Two Sections" typescript sent to Nadell, the cover sheet is followed by a section titled "Preliminary Throat Clearings," typed "but with a handwritten Cut?' at the top" — containing the dedication ("which still exists, though slightly modified"), an epigraph from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell reading "Sorrow brings forth," and "definitions of addict and addiction from the Oxford English Dictionary" Riles's firsthand archive account

In the published book. This material does not appear in the published book. Surviving remnant = the book's dedication page

Evidence. A single source reports this. Documented by Riles's firsthand archive account (firsthand HRC reading-room sighting).

Further notes. The only sighted draft state of the book's front matter, and it framed the novel addiction-first — Blake plus dictionary definitions of addict/addiction as the reader's doorway — an explicitness print entirely drops (cf. diff-cut-hal-drug-history's pattern of removing explicit signposting). Who wrote the "Cut?" is unrecorded; it is a query in an unidentified hand, not a documented editorial order. OED-definition absence is asserted for the apparatus, not the phrase. Firsthand manuscript-state addition, gated like the rest of the riles tier on eventual HRC text access for line-level confirmation.