[Tavern-Talk] Trust Talk - All Four Major Compilations of Discourses Now Online

[Tavern-talk]

  Original Sixth Edition of Discourses Released Online
All Four Major Compilations of Discourses Now Available
in Online Library

The Avatar Meher Baba Trust is happy to announce the completion of a 
major online publishing project that has been in the works for almost 
four years.

This week an online version of the original sixth edition of Meher 
Baba's Discourses, edited by Don Stevens and Ivy Duce and published by 
Sufism Reoriented in 1967, becomes available in the online library of 
the Avatar Meher Baba's Trust's web site at: 
http://ambppct.org/meherbaba/Discourses.php. As doubtless many of you 
know, the sixth edition was republished by Sheriar Foundation in 2007 as 
what is being called the "revised sixth edition." But what we are 
publishing on the Trust web site is not that redesigned and slightly 
revised text, but the original text of the three-volume 1967 edition, as 
presented in its fifth (1973) reprinting. That original text has been 
reproduced exactly, without any changes at all. We have not even 
corrected misspellings.

With the release of the online sixth edition, the Trust web site now 
completes its undertaking to make available online the four major 
compilations of Meher Baba's Discourses. Those editions are:

(1) The five-volume set, originally published in India between 1939 and 
1943. The various volumes of this collection went through multiple 
editions, the last of them published in 1955. Edited by Dr. C. D. 
Deshmukh and others of Meher Baba's mandali, the five-volume set 
contains all sixty-nine of the original discourses.
(2) God to Man and Man to God, edited by Charles B. Purdom and published 
in 1955 by Victor Gollancz, a distinguished publisher in London. 
Purdom's edition contains sixty discourses, many of them substantially 
pared back and reduced in their verbiage.
(3) The sixth edition, edited by Don E. Stevens and Ivy Oneita Duce and 
published in three volumes by Sufism Reoriented in 1967. The editors 
used the original five-volume set as their source text and retained all 
sixty-nine discourses.
(4) The seventh edition, edited by Eruch Jessawala, Bal Natu, and J. 
Flagg Kris and published in a single volume by Sheriar Press in 1987. 
Working from the sixth edition, the editors added one further discourse 
of Baba's to the original sixty-nine.

The online availability of these the four major compilations will serve 
the interests of many Baba lovers, especially those who wish to study 
the history of these essays and the variations between their different 
versions. Those investigating this subject may find of use the "History 
of the Discourses" incorporated into the Discourses, revised sixth 
edition (Myrtle Beach: Sheriar Foundation, 2007), vol. 4, pp. 3–80.

Actually, the five-volume set does not represent the original and 
first-most publication of the discourses. By the time the five-volume 
set appeared, fifty-one of them had already been released in the Meher 
Baba Journal (1938–42); the first four volumes of the five-volume set 
reproduced Baba's essays from the Journal on a year-by-year basis. It is 
our hope eventually to publish the entire contents of the Meher Baba 
Journal in our online-library. When that large undertaking is completed, 
readers will have access to those fifty-one discourses as they were 
first presented to the world. Until then, however, users of the online 
library can know that the first editions of the five-volume set 
reproduced Baba's text from the Meher Baba Journal essentially 
unaltered, except perhaps for some misspellings corrected and some new 
mistakes that may have crept in unintentionally.

This present online sixth edition, like all of our online editions, 
should not be misconstrued as a facsimile reproduction of the original 
books. In creating these online versions, we digitally scan the original 
print versions, read them through OCR ("optical character recognition") 
software, reflow and redesign the text, and proofread it. The content of 
the original publications has been reproduced on a page-by-page basis. 
We have not used the same fonts, however; and the page design, 
lineation, and text flow has all been done afresh. The virtue to this 
process is that it results in internet files that are more easily 
searchable and faster to download. You'll have to go to the printed 
books, however, if you want the exact original appearances.

Since we work with a small though dedicated volunteer staff, it is 
possible that mistakes have wormed their way into these online editions. 
If you find any of these, we will be grateful if you inform us. You can 
contact us at: frank at ambppvt.org.

Ward Parks
for Trust Talk
26th November 2008