The authoritative text of The House of the Seven Gables is the edition published by the Ohio State University Press in 1963 as volume 2 of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne [Ce0263]. It is approved for teaching purposes by the Modern Language Association. A more accessible edition of the version is in the Library of America series.
Because that edition was copyrighted in 1963, we could not use it as the basis for this hypertext. Instead, we use the text of the first American edition, published in 1851, and thus now in the public domain [].
We used the Gutenberg Project ASCII version (sg10), as our basis. In proofreading, we compared our version to the first American edition as printed in the Norton Critical Edition text []. A few differences between it and the Centenary Edition are given in our notes.
We have reproduced the text here without regard to the original layout or pagination. Em dashes are rendered as "--" (two hyphens or minus signs) without spaces on either side. The text is not justified to the right margin as in the original. Words orginally hyphenated at the ends of lines have been divided by hyphens or not, according to our best suppositions. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have not been modernized.