Some texts and references are quite venerable, having survived many editions. The Materials Handbook sometimes has statements in it that betray great age; references to porpoise leather, chalmoogra oil and the like. That stuff is fun but would be more fun if I knew more of its provenance.

Different colored text is a little too frufru for a paper text. But it would be easy (and easy to turn off) in an electronic text. I propose that different colors correspond to different editions, so one could learn the vintage of statements which had made it thru to the present. If there existed electronic versions of the previous editions this would not be that tough to do, either.

I can imagine clicking on the purple text about the tanning properties of Asian dog dung and lo! - the text changes to mostly purple. It is the 1951 edition from which that text hails. There are fewer colors because of fewer previous editions. But now I can dig into the uses of dung that are only hinted at in the more recent edition before switching back to the present.
-- bungston, Sep 22 2015

Apparatus Criticus https://en.wikipedi.../Critical_apparatus
an older, but related, invention [pertinax, Sep 28 2015]

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In these more eco-friendly days, perhaps publishers ought to be required to manage end-of-life reuse of old textbooks. Rather than simply pulping them, they could be scanned, laser-cut, and the words and sentences pasted back together to create newer editions.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 22 2015


You could treat email spam, junk mail, and currencies in a similar way, but it would not be as interesting to me as Asian dog dung.
-- popbottle, Sep 24 2015


There have been some entertaining stories of the bollocks Darwin added to later editions of the Origins of Species, which have been surpressed by the media.
-- 4and20, Sep 24 2015


But how do species evolve without bollocks?
-- pocmloc, Sep 24 2015


It occurs to me that The Handbook Of Chemistry And Physics has undergone extensive revisions on many an occasion. Whole tables in old editions were declared obsolete and excluded from later editions. I for one would like to see ALL the different tables that had ever been in it.
-- Vernon, Sep 28 2015



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