Faulkner meets Danielewski in multiple shades of awesome: the Folio Society, which heretofore I have associated with expensive, overdone editions of books that are never read, is releasing an edition of The Sound and the Fury that responds to Faulkner’s hope that each timeframe of the Benjy chapater be printed in a distinct color of ink. Expediency forced Faulkner and his publishers to rely on shifts between Roman and Italic type to denote the changes.
The Folio Society … drew on the expertise of two noted Faulkner scholars to work on fulfilling Faulkner’s idea. Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk undertook the painstaking task of identifying each different time-level to be coloured, while keeping the original italic/roman shifts. We can never know if this is exactly what Faulkner would have envisaged, but the result justifies his belief that coloured inks would allow readers to follow the strands of the novel more easily, without compromising the ‘thought-transference’ for which he argued so passionately.