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The Soft Machine
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==Editions== ''The Soft Machine'' has been printed in four different editions, the first three revised by the author, the last by Burroughs scholar [[Oliver Harris]]. # The first edition was printed by [[Olympia Press]] in Paris, in 1961, as number 88 in the Traveller Companion Series. It featured 182 pages arranged in 50 chapters of about 8 pages each. This edition was colour-coded into four different Units, and it was heavily fragmented. This edition is rare and the text is not widely available.<ref>Barry Miles. Ch. 7, "Cut-ups". ''El Hombre Invisible: William S. Burroughs: A Portrait'', 2002 edition. p124.</ref> # The second edition was printed by [[Grove Press]] in the United States, in 1966. In this edition, Burroughs removed 82 pages and inserted 82 new pages, and the remaining 100 pages were rearranged and restructured using further [[cut-up technique|cut-ups]]. Much of the added material was linear, narrative prose, which is arguably easier to read than the disorganized first edition. Many chapters were renamed and rearranged in this edition, and the colour code from the first edition was removed. # The third edition was printed by [[John Calder]] in Great Britain, 1968. This time most chapter titles were intact from the second edition, but they began at more natural places in the text, whereas the second edition could place them in the middle of a sentence. The chapter ''1920s War Movies'' was renamed ''The Streets of Chance''. Twenty pages of new material had been added, plus about eight pages from the first edition which had been removed in the second edition. About five pages of material which was present in both the first and second edition was removed. This edition also included an "[[Addendum|Appendix]]" and "Afterword". # The fourth 'Restored' edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States in 2014. Drawing on the discovery of a manuscript of ''The Soft Machine'' that was to have been published by Olympia Press in 1963, this edition restores a short cancelled chapter ('Male Image Back In'), restores the 1961 edition's heavy use of capital letters, and has some different chapter breaks. The edition also includes an introduction, extensive notes and appendices. Burroughs himself was very displeased with the first edition and this was the main reason for rewriting it so thoroughly: in 1961 he wrote to his friend [[Allen Ginsberg]] that he rewrote it extensively while he was working on ''[[Dead Fingers Talk]]'', mostly because he was displeased with the balance of cut-up and more linear material. However, his revised editions included much new cut-up material as well as more conventional prose.
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