3The essays in this issue offer, each in their own way, a fitting illustration of the value of comparative genetic criticism and holograph studies. In her analysis of the holograph manuscript of Pessoa’s “Hora Absurda”, Carlotta Defenu demonstrates how the author’s use of the synecdoche figure of speech is gradually introduced into his drafts, as he continues to revise the poem. Next, a theoretical discussion of the status of variants in holograph manuscripts is offered by Paula Italia, who presents a typology of the different kinds of “alternative variants”. And, as Italia argues, although this type of variant is more readily associated with the modern manuscripts of the twentieth century, the Italian tradition is in a unique position to include examples in this typology that date all the way back to Petrarch. Martin Navrátil, on the other hand, has to start from a less luxurious position. For his reconstruction of Ruža, a collection of Slovak poems by Vojtech Mihálik’s that came second in a literary competition in 1946, only a tentative list of poem titles recorded in the author’s manuscript notebooks survives. This leads to an interesting case study that explores methods to both minimize the editor’s conjecture, and give the reader more agency in the process.

4“Creativity is not an exclusively textual matter” write Van Hulle and Beloborodova (xi), a statement clearly substantiated in the essay of Jorge Silva Rocha. He undertook a comparative study into the variation of the images adjacent to the text of one particular copy of the Beatus Commentary. By applying stemmatic methods to explore the pictoral tradition of the Beatus, Silva’s contribution indeed broadens the study of variance, showing how the images evolved independent of the text but dependent on each other. Paulius Subačius, then, introduces us to some “curious incidents” in the history of holographs, taking various examples from the works of twentieth-century Lithuanian authors. Following “ancient-like writing habits” (87), these authors added notes to their texts of which the meaning is not always evident. Through a classification of these modern authorial glosses, Subačius provides some guidance to scholarly editors who may wonder how to handle them. Finally, our essay section is concluded by a contribution from Gabriele Wix, who brings the discussion back to what Van Hulle and Beloborodova call “the born-digital holograph”(ix), by using a case study of a Marcel Beyer poem cycle to examine interactions between analogue and born-digital writing processes. And what are the implications for the genetic editor, Wix asks, when an author presents us with a well-organized and prearranged genetic dossier of born-digital draft materials?

5The Holograph Description section is new in Variants and although we do not usually publish descriptive contributions of manuscripts, we found that they were well fitted within the “Histories of the Holograph”–theme of the present issue. The section contains two contributions about a twelfth century and a seventeenth century manuscript, by Carolina Maria Escobar-Vargas and Juan Lorente Sanchez respectively. Both authors demonstrate a remarkably detailed level of subject-specific knowledge and their reports provide ample incentives for future research.

6This issue also includes another Work in Progress section, with contributions that contain shorter and less formal research narratives that are more practice oriented and allow researchers to report on more preliminary research findings. Here, Kyoko Myojo’s contribution demonstrates the importance of examining what Van Hulle and Beloborodova called the “no-man’s-land between the author’s desk and the publishing house”(xi), in this case the editorial interventions in Franz Kafka’s Der Process. Her genetic analysis of the manuscripts made her reconsider the conventional chapter order as well as the entire text of the current Japanese edition. Jason Wiens, then, closes this section with a report on some of the activities and results from a project that aims to visualize data, links, and writing processes found in the University of Calgary’s archive of the Alice Munro papers. As such, the project means to analyse the genetic development and interrelation of the stories contained in the archive of this Canadian author who sadly passed away recently, and to open up avenues for future research on her oeuvre.

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