Only one edition of Parerga and Paralipomena was published during Schopenhauer's lifetime. The second volume appeared as:

The present translation uses the text as edited by Arthur Hübscher, Arthur Schopenhauers Sämtliche Werke (Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 1988), vol. 6. Hübscher's text is a confection based on A, but resulting from a substantial revision of it that includes numerous alterations and added material from handwritten sources. The majority of these come from Schopenhauer's own copy of A, in which he made extensive notes. Others come from passages in his manuscript remains. Working on the assumption that Schopenhauer was assembling revisions with a view to re-publication, in 1862, two years after Schopenhauer's death, Julius Frauenstädt incorporated many of these handwritten passages in a new edition, which he described as ‘improved and considerably augmented’:

Thereafter various revisions appeared in the versions of Schopenhauer's complete works under different editors, who have not agreed on the placing of all the handwritten passages. Here we simply follow Hübscher's decisions. (For a full account of the handwritten sources, editorial history and list of variations across the different editions, see Hübscher, SW 6, 699ff.)

The upshot of this process is that, although, almost without exception, all the words in the text we have translated are Schopenhauer's, he never saw a published German text that resembled the present edition very closely. Setting aside mere orthographical variations, there are hundreds of incorporated alterations to A of different kinds: some are small grammatical or lexical changes, some add emphasis to a point or give an extra bibliographical reference, some correct errors. Others insert substantial material amounting to whole paragraphs. In this translation we have been selective, noting only those changes to A that introduce significantly new material, or that have their source in the Manuscript Remains, in those manuscript books to which Schopenhauer gave the titles ‘Senilia’, ‘Spicilegia’, ‘Pandectae’, Philosophari’, ‘Adversaria’, ‘Cogitata’ and ‘Foliant’.