Oh dear.

Unable to read what James wrote and unreflectively willing to print nonsense, the editor regularly resorts to what seems like desperate guesswork. Punctuation and capitalization are frequent incidental casualties. This is the final paragraph as printed from “British Library Archive” (correctly British Library MS Additional 52782, fols 6–7v):

I am just pre-pressing [beginning to print] a bit of the Lambeth MSS with bib-Cambridge I suppose the Psalter no. 233 is ready anytime?

This is what James actually wrote:

I am just publishing (beginning to print) a bit of the Lambeth MSS with provenances. I suppose the Psalter no. 233 is East Anglian.

Mistranscription is accompanied by nonsensical or non-existent annotation. At one point James is presented as talking about “my old favourite Bosworth of Bunny’s”. The passage leads the editor into understandably tortured ingenuity in her efforts to identify this figure. James is in fact referring to the fifteenth-century bibliographer Boston of Bury, a recurrent interest. ©

As a former archivist and a (not so former) textual scholar, I am reading this with a fair bit of frustration: everyone who has deciphered manuscripts at least once knows that it’s a sophisticated and intricate task, whose results almost cannot be completed in their entirety in a short period of time. You should always bear in mind that someone else who will come after you most likely will do a better job in solving word puzzles: that’s how it usually goes. But it also doesn’t mean that your work has to be completely obliterated: after all, it’s always easier to criticise than to do it yourself.

I have the aforementioned book and thoroughly enjoyed its content: the amount of obscure interpretations, gaps and lacunas in there didn’t distract me much—perhaps because I’ve seen many of these things before. A shame, though, that it was seemingly impossible to publish it in a less convoluted way, but then again: the first (or one of the first as I don’t know for a fact how many of them had been done already) attempt of releasing a correspondence of a renowned author is always an easy target for critics.