MCO Thirteen Edition Miscellany – Fragment III
Fragment III
Among the more puzzling traits of the surviving Thirteen Edition copies
is the inconsistent presence of an Index.
Some copies possess no index at all—
not even a blank page where such a feature might have been planned.
Others include a few hesitant headings
(“King’s Gambit,” “Irregular Openings,” “See also: Variants”),
yet the pages they reference do not correspond to any known pagination.
And then there is the rarest category:
copies that contain an index only,
printed with meticulous care
but referring to chapters the book has never possessed.
In one such copy—now somewhere between Cambridge and nowhere—
the index appears at the front rather than the back,
as if attempting to preface a text it no longer remembers.
Its entries are brief, almost shy:
On the Author’s Absence …… 213
On Future Editions …… 224
On the Reader Yet to Arrive …… 231
Yet the surviving Thirteen Edition contains no page 213,
no section on future editions,
and certainly no chapter dedicated
to a “reader yet to arrive.”
Even more curious is the date
printed discreetly at the bottom of the index leaf:
“Compiled: 2027.”
The Thirteen Edition is, at the very latest estimates,
a creation of the mid-twentieth century.
How, then, does a book acquire an index
authored decades after its own publication?
One explanation suggests an overzealous archivist
who revised the edition long after its circulation.
Another theory claims the date was added in error
from a different book’s printing plate.
But these theories lose their footing
when faced with a further anomaly:
the index references appear to anticipate passages
that only emerged in later, damaged copies—
as though the index were remembering
versions of the book that had not yet been written.
The Thirteen Edition, it seems,
does not merely reorganize itself between printings;
it reorganizes itself between readers.
Perhaps the index is less a guide to the book
than a guide to the book’s intentions—
a faint outline of future deviations,
an editorial whisper from an edition that might yet exist.
Or perhaps the index is simply mistaken,
a relic of a draft that never took form.
But when one encounters
an index entry titled “On the Missing Diagrams,”
located precisely at the page
where a diagram refuses to appear in every known copy,
one begins to suspect the Thirteen Edition is not mistaken at all.
It is merely ahead of itself.
