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H J Jackson, Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, Vol. 9: Spallanzini–Zeno. Ed. by Natalia Elaguina, with notes by John Renwick, Gillian Pink, and others, The Library, Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 575–576, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/20.4.575
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Extract
This is the penultimate volume of a monumental scholarly edition that began in Oxford fifty years ago—a great achievement for the founding editor, the late Theodore Besterman, and all his successors in the Voltaire Foundation.
Assuming that the final volume appears as intended, the publication of Voltaire’s notes in books will also represent a triumph of international academic collaboration. The complete works at first excluded the marginalia, which had been taken on by a group of scholars at what is now the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. Publication began in Berlin, but when the East German publishing arrangements collapsed, the Foundation stepped in. They had the first five volumes reprinted as part of their own edition and saw to it that the project continued, coordinating teams of native Russian-, French-, and English-speaking experts to produce four more volumes and complete the alphabetical series at Zeno. Volume 10 will cover a separate set of books and manuscripts from outside Voltaire’s personal library, works that he marked or annotated not for himself but for acquaintances or correspondents and therefore annotated differently. It is also expected now to include a ‘retrospective’ essay about Voltaire as a reader but, as far as I can make out, not anything resembling a comprehensive index.
