ABSTRACT
Sometime between the early modern and the Romantic periods the meaning of the adjective 'original' changed. From denoting the derivative it came to mean the opposite: something without origin, something that was itself an original. Alice Walker was a colleague and correspondent of McKerrow, with whom she has much in common. Removing the veil of print identifying the accretions of the printing house so that we can see through them to the author at work, was the focal point of all New Bibliographical inquiry. If Compositor B wrestled with two forms of spelling 'prithee', Alice Walker wrestled with two ways of editing Shakespeare: old spelling versus modern spelling. Given that she later became the editor of the Oxford University Press Old Spelling Shakespeare, the resolution of her personal struggle in favour of modernized editions is surprising. Textual writing was not revolutionized until the 1980s with the prose of Gary Taylor.
