Mistakes Corrected in the 20th Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest (And Some That Weren't)

TL;DR

A line-by-line collation, by the DFW Words blogger "Don", of the roughly fifty textual changes Little, Brown's editors made when they reset Infinite Jest for its 2016 twentieth-anniversary paperback — each entry giving the corrected sentence with the earlier, erroneous reading in square brackets — plus a short "Still Uncorrected" list of surviving errors and a reader-comment thread. It is the fullest publicly available map of that emendation pass, and its most interesting thread is the worry (raised by Don and a commenter) that some of the "corrections" quietly overwrote errors Wallace had made on purpose. Because the bracketed old readings are what earlier printings carry, the list doubles as an edition-fingerprint key for telling one printing of the novel from another. It records the changes as they were realized in print; the post claims no access to any correction list of Wallace's or the publisher's own.

Key claims

• Little, Brown "recently rereleased Infinite Jest in an alluring new paperback edition for its twentieth anniversary", and beyond the fan-made cover and Tom Bissell introduction the reset text was extensively reproofed; Don judges that "I think LB's editorial staff did a wonderful job."
• The scale surprised him: the editors "spotted way more unintentional errors than I think anyone realized were in the book", and "a good 92% of their emendations help Infinite Jest put its best foot forward for first-time readers." The remaining "8% really needs to be fixed for the next edition" (Don's problem pages: 440–442, 761, 981, 1035).
• The corrections span simple typo fixes (p. 92 "amaneunsis" → amanuensis; p. 374 "labrynth" → labyrinth; p. 460 "Gaugin" → Gauguin; p. 393 "Scorcese" → Scorsese, scene 083), missing punctuation, dropped/duplicated words (p. 499 "the the waist"; p. 1067 "an an unbuttoned"), and layout fixes (p. 736 triple-line-break realignment; p. 981 the partial lower-right circle restored from the hardcover).
• The intentional-error worry: at p. 752 the editors changed "Antitoi Entertainent" to "Antitoi Entertainment" (scene 153) — but a commenter protested it "should say Antitoi Entertainent", and Don replied "I did wonder if they fixed some intentional errors." (The misspelled form recurs elsewhere in the novel, scene 097, 147.) Don similarly objected to the removal of colons in the stage-direction lines on pp. 440–442 ("Removal of colons when nobody says anything", e.g. the "VEALS [Blows nose at high volume]" line, scene 091), "especially since similar changes weren't made on pgs. 877-883".
• One "correction" introduced a fresh error: at p. 1035, note 209 the editors replaced the earlier printings' "kibbitzing" with "kibitizng" (endnote scene n209) — as Don's note flags, the "correction" is itself a different mistake (his wording implying the double-b original was nonstandard too).
• The "Still Uncorrected" list keeps genuine survivors — a missing closing parenthesis at p. 170; the p. 386 "P.M. CAN" needing a period; the p. 867 reversed single/double quotation marks; the p. 1005 "TheYellow Rose" run-together — while a commenter adds the p. 82 "Lieber Gott nein" "superscript mistake on page 82 is still extant in the 20th Anniversary Edition", and others report a missing "kill" at p. 540 and font-shifts flagging where the reset text diverges page to page.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Some of the anniversary "corrections" overwrote errors Wallace made deliberately

• Crux: intentional-errors
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] The p. 752 "Entertainent" → "Entertainment" change, against a reader's claim that the misspelling was deliberate; the same misspelled form recurs untouched elsewhere in the novel (scene 097, 147). [¶ pg. 752; comments]
  • [text] The pp. 440–442 colon-removal in the no-speech stage directions, which Don argues should not have been made given the parallel lines on pp. 877–883 were left alone. [¶ pgs. 440-442]
  • [secondary] A commenter's general caution that "there are many intentional errors as well, some of which must never be changed." [¶ comments]
• Notes: In-source pushback is symmetric and recorded cite-as-written: Don overall praises the pass ("a wonderful job", "92% … help") while flagging the 8% he thinks overreached; he does not claim to know which errors were intentional, only that he "did wonder if they fixed some intentional errors." The blog offers no authorial source for intentionality — this is reader inference, with no documentation from Wallace's or the publisher's own correction records.

Themes

The novel's textual apparatus and its errors (intentional and unintentional); editions and printings; the ethics of editing a dead author's text; the typographic and layout life of the book (circles, charts, font shifts).

Cross-references

• The blog's own galley-vs-first-printing collation and "two mistakes" essay, which map earlier strata of the same textual history; this post is the latest (2016) layer.
• The reread journal by the same blogger, whose 2013 "possible mistakes" list overlaps several entries here (p. 90, p. 100), making it an intermediate census between the first printing and this correction pass.
• The typographical-circles material: the p. 981 partial-circle restoration and p. 1024 HALSADICK chart shading are entries in the novel's circle/diagram motif.
• Scene anchors for the headline cases: p. 393 Scorsese (scene 083); p. 752 Antitoi Entertainment (scene 153; the misspelling recurs at scene 097, 147); pp. 440–442 stage-direction colons (scene 091); p. 82 "Lieber Gott nein" (scene 026); p. 1035 note 209 kibbitzing (scene n209).

Notable passages

• "they spotted way more unintentional errors than I think anyone realized were in the book."
• "a good 92% of their emendations help Infinite Jest put its best foot forward for first-time readers."
• Don, on the intentional-error worry: "I did wonder if they fixed some intentional errors."
• A commenter: "yes, there are many intentional errors as well, some of which must never be changed."