By way of illuminating the editorial methods involved in bringing volume 5 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot to life, I offer two small details: a troublesome comma and a trifling fact. The first tidbit entails a disruptive comma. As it stands in the original 1936 publication, the first comma of the following sentence is clearly a punctuation error:

Appearing in Eliot's unsigned, one-paragraph review of Selected Shelburne Essays, this misplaced comma hardly ranks as a textual crux, but resolving the problem is a bit of a nuisance, complicated by the fact that this review's appearance in The Criterion is the only known text. There exist no proofs, typescript, manuscript, or reprints that we know of, so The Criterion version becomes by default the copy-text. Even if some other version of the review were extant, that document still might not enable us to determine if this comma was Eliot's clear intention, his sloppy error, or a typesetter's addition. (Eliot was a notoriously inconsistent proofreader of his own work. Even where galley proofs exist, the only assurance that Eliot saw them would be the presence of marginal annotations in his hand.) By contrast, the profusion of collations in the newly published Poems testifies to the attention textual scholars and literary critics give to the smallest variations in appearances of poems that were published in a variety of forms during Eliot's lifetime.

My coeditors and I could have silently deleted that comma in the Shelburne review, since it is clearly a grammatical error and since we have no more authoritative manuscript for comparison.3 However, in spite of their absence in this case, original manuscripts and galley proofs are not the only place to look for signs of authorial intention. Even before I had undertaken work on volume 5, I had noticed that Eliot often inserts an unnecessary comma between the subject and predicate. To give four other examples just from volume 5: