> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Which Scarlet Letter Should You Read? A Guide to the Editions - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/scarlet-letter-editions-guide/ - Published: 2026-11-06T20:38:14.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-09T22:18:09.000Z - Description: Penguin for a first read, Norton for the criticism, Oxford for the notes. Whatever you buy, it needs The Custom-House, the book's own origin story. - Author: John Kaag - Tags: Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, #edition If you want one answer: read the Penguin Classics edition, which prints the authoritative Centenary text with notes. Make sure your copy includes "The Custom-House," the long introductory sketch, and the short preface Nathaniel Hawthorne added for the second edition in 1850\. The Norton Critical Edition is the one for the criticism and the stories. The Oxford World's Classics is the one for the notes. Megan Marshall, whose Rebind series goes through the novel chapter by chapter, is a biographer of the Hawthornes and the Peabody sisters. She reads the Custom-House as the book's own origin story, and the series opens there. The text of *The Scarlet Letter* (1850) is not the problem. Nearly every serious edition prints the Centenary Edition text from Ohio State, established in 1962, and the differences between it and the first printing are small. The problem is what comes before chapter one. Some teachers skip the Custom-House. Some cheap reprints of the first edition drop the second-edition preface. Marshall's series treats both as part of the novel. ## **The Copy Marshall Reads From** Marshall first read the book as a public high school junior in Pasadena, in a Signet paperback the school handed out. In [Episode 1](https://www.rebindclassics.com/more-my-book/) she remembers what her teacher did with those paperbacks: > *"And you know, it had always been the case that our use of these books — you know, the science textbook, the math textbook — do not write in them. Do not write in them. And you know, if you did by any chance, when you're returning the book at the end of the semester or the end of the year, you had to erase anything. But he just said, look, write in these books. You're not giving them back, you're going to keep them. And I don't know what that cost him to support. But ever since then, I have always written in my books, and it served me well as, you know, I went on from there to become an English major."* She was fifteen, and by her own account understood less than she pretended to: "I don't think I knew the word adultery." In the introduction film she says what the book became: "It's the book that made me a biographer." So the copy to buy is one you can write in and keep. In [Episode 2](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-letter-in-red-tape/) she reads from her own, and the phrase that matters for this guide slips out: "at least in my edition, there's a preface to the second edition, very short." [![](https://www.rebindclassics.com/c/6b/f6/6bf60075-63ee-49e0-bb0c-3a98b78af6d6/content/images/2026/09/LP_Scarlet-Letter_EP1_1280x720.png)Free filmWatch Megan Marshall’s introduction to The Scarlet LetterMegan Marshall traces The Scarlet Letter past the Custom House firing to Hawthorne's boyhood among women and his long secret engagement to Sophia Peabody.Film 1 · Free to watch, no account needed →](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-scarlet-letter-introduction/) ## **The Custom-House, and the Preface Hawthorne Almost Dropped** The Custom-House is a long sketch, about forty pages, on Hawthorne's years as a customs surveyor in Salem and the political firing that ended them. It closes on the bundle of papers, tied in red tape, where he claims to have found Hester's letter. Salem was furious. Marshall explains in Episode 2 why Hawthorne kept it: > *"So the very presence of this preface, which addresses a real-life situation, a controversy that was live at the time, meant that more people read the book and more people reviewed the book and more people knew about the book. But I also think it's, you know, a clever tactic in its way, even though for us now it seems a little overblown, or tedious even, dare I say."* For the second edition, a few weeks later, Hawthorne added a short preface saying he had considered toning the sketch down and had decided to reprint it without changing a word. Marshall reads the line she loves from it, that the sketch was written "so far as his abilities availed, with a livelier effect of truth," and says why it matters to her: > *"And I just think, you know, that also, realizing this is one of the reasons I'm particularly fond of this book, is that it derives from the very kind of work that later became my work. You know, a story that comes out of a manuscript, or a document — I mean, a letter."* The Rebind text has both the sketch and the preface. The editions below do too, with one exception noted. Free account Read more with a free account. - The opening films of every book, with its guide - More essays open to you on the site - Listen In: minutes from every audio series - The Rebind newsletter, every couple of weeks Join free → Check your inbox for a sign-in link. Something went wrong. Please try again. Want everything? [Subscribe for every episode, film and essay →](#/portal/signup) ## **Penguin Classics** Penguin's current edition (2015) prints the Centenary text with notes by Thomas E. Connolly, an introduction by Robert Milder, and a foreword by Tom Perrotta. The earlier Penguin, with Nina Baym's introduction and the same notes, is still around and just as good. Either is the copy for a first read beside the series: the right text, enough notes, and a spine that will take a pencil. ## **Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition** Leland S. Person's Norton (2017) is titled *The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings* because it adds five of the stories, including "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil." Around them are passages from Hawthorne's notebooks and letters, nineteenth-century reviews, and a long section of modern criticism. It is the edition for a reader who wants the argument about the book, and for one who wants the Hawthorne of the stories, which Marshall keeps returning to. One reader's complaint on the record is that it's two-thirds commentary. That is what it's for. ## **Oxford World's Classics** Brian Harding's Oxford edition, with an introduction by Cindy Weinstein (2008), uses the Centenary text and has the fullest explanatory notes in a paperback, mostly on the Puritan and antebellum background. If you want to know who the historical Governor Bellingham was, or what the Boston of the 1640s actually did to adulterers, this is where the answers are. ## **The Scholar's Text, Cheaply** The Centenary text with its full textual apparatus is in the John Harvard Library edition (Harvard, introduction by Michael J. Colacurcio), which prints the variants between the first and second editions. The Library of America volume of Hawthorne's novels, edited by Millicent Bell, also uses the Centenary text, with almost no notes. Neither is a first copy. Both are where to go when you want to see what the second edition changed. ## **A Note on What to Avoid** Two things. The first is any edition without "The Custom-House." Most editions include it, including the Dover Thrift, which reprints the 1850 first edition and so has the sketch but not the second-edition preface. But teachers do skip it, and Marshall's series doesn't: "if your teacher skipped it and you're curious about what you missed, now's your chance to find out," as she says in the introduction film. The second is the modern-English industry around this book: *No Fear Literature* with its facing-page "translation," the "Plain and Simple English" versions, the condensed editions. Hawthorne's sentences are the book. Marshall's own first reading was in high school, and in [Episode 9](https://www.rebindclassics.com/under-one-roof/) she admits that "when I was reading it as a high school student, I like tuned out" during the chapters about the two men. "Reading it as an adult, I see how this is really at the center." That is a reason to reread, not to simplify. ## **Reading It with Marshall** The series goes through the novel in order, from the Custom-House to the final chapter, and Marshall reads it the way she reads an archive, with the Hawthornes' letters and the Peabody sisters' lives in hand. Start with [the free introduction film](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-scarlet-letter-introduction/). Then read [He Didn't Make This Up](https://www.rebindclassics.com/lives-underneath-scarlet-letter/), the essay that opens the series, and listen to [Episode 1, More My Book](https://www.rebindclassics.com/more-my-book/), whose first five minutes are free. Penguin or Oxford in your hand, a pencil in the other, and the Custom-House read, not skipped.