F. P. Grove's A Search for America

About the 2005 "blue" e-Edition of ASA: The main reason for revising this e-publication was an aesthetic one. The text, not being contained in any table, stretched over the whole width of a browser window, so that one might see several sprawling pages, each not much longer than the beautiful running-title illustration preceding it. Limiting each chapter to the width of a relatively narrow table achieves the goal of roughly one page per screen, thus mimicking the original printed publication, and having the illustration rarely appear more than once on an ordinary, letter-sized print-out.
In addition, it was necessary to create individual documents for important components previously hidden away in conglomerate files named "matter-front" and the likes. There is now a direct link to the title-page, the wordy dedication to Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, the imprint, the very detailed colophon and the two pages of Graphic Publisher advertisement which appear only in the 1927 edition.
In the 2000 e-Edition, there were many links to detailed records in the UM Libraries' on-line catalogue BISON. All of these fell prey to one or the other change in the fast-paced electronic revolution. Many have been purged, while others appear now as separate html pages.
Finally, for certain key-passages of Grove's revealing and often confessional book, links to important related documents and/or scholarly papers have been introduced, providing meaningful connections in the exploration and discussion of FPG (Greve/Grove)'s intricate dual lives and works.
A good example is the first chapter, where FPG planted FOUR clues to his elusive passage to North America, two on page 1, and two more on pages 9/10. Taking them at face-value led us to the discovery, in October 1998, that Greve had crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to Montreal on the White Star Liner Megantic in late July 1909. Other findings facilitated by this text concern FPG's otherwise undocumented "lost" American years, so, for instance, the Bonanza Farm "in the Dakotas", and the bookselling scam of a New York publisher.
FPG's fabricated autobiography in ASA finds remarkable parallels in the biographical sketch he sent in 1907 for inclusion in a literary lexicon -- this is one of the bilingual key-documents now available on the UMA's website. Another one is Gide's "Conversation avec un allemand" which contains an important early letter by Greve detailing his 'Fanny Essler' plans in poetry & prose. A third one, namely the seven 1904/5 poems by "Fanny Essler', along with an article about their genesis, can be found on the editor's site. There, as in the introduction to FPG's Poetry Edition of 1993, Freytag-Loringhoven's reminiscences about Greve in Europe & America, and notably in Sparta, Kentucky, throw light on the Canadian author's early existence up to 1911.