Jones & Newman's "Horror: 100 Best Books"

No, the book specifically cites the collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I can post a table of contents if you want to be able to compare stories, but I’d like to keep the list matching the book.

And for #17, I deliberately didn’t choose the one you’re suggesting because I don’t want all that gobbledygook after the title mucking up the list. In fact, I’ve been forcibly restraining myself from changing it on the Peter Boxall list. :)

[Edited for spelling.]

Actually, I did end up finding a more popular version of Tales of Mystery and Imagination (and it has a much better cover), so thanks for bringing it up.

Warning: this post is really long and verges on rant status.

I really don’t want it to be standardized – at least not in that way – I like being able to choose exactly the edition of a book I want. For this particular series of lists, the title and edition of the book are important because in a lot of cases the authors were suggesting specific groups of stories, a specific illustrator, or a specific editor’s commentary about the story (s)he chose.

I generally try to use the one that’s the most popular, too, unless it’s somehow flawed: misspelled, wrong author, a critical work about the book instead of the book itself, HUGE, IRRITATING, DISTRACTING CAPITAL LETTERS, or (and this annoys me the most) free advertising. To me, it’s not worth making a list ugly and inaccurate just to save a bit of time. Besides, part of the fun of adopting a new list (at least for me) is scrolling through and checking stuff off.

Also, all this stuff we’re doing is being tracked by Amazon somehow, and I don’t want to encourage the publication of more editions of crappy-quality, abridged versions of books.

I think the kind of standardization you’re talking about kind of goes against the whole idea of the website…like you said, we all have our own criteria, so there would never be any consensus about which was the “definitive” version of a book or movie (or whatever), especially with someone like Poe who’s been anthologized so many times you could probably fill an entire library with them. Besides, there are new editions of books (especially classics) coming out all the time, which would make standardization a pain in the ass.