“Believing that a book’s physical form influenced its relationship with a reader, [Cather] selected type, paper, and format that invited the reader response she sought. The heavy texture and cream color of paper used for O Pioneers! and My Antonia, for example, created a sense of warmth and invited a childlike play of imagination, as did these books’ large, dark type and wide margins. By the same principle, she expressly rejected the anthology format of assembling texts of numerous novels within the covers of one volume, with tight margins, thin paper, and condensed print.”

Which is really interesting and calls into question the editors’ desire to get at an “authoritative” and uncorrupted text. Does the scholarly edition then have to take into account the kind of paper?

According to these editors, yes. “The volumes in the Cather Edition respect those intentions insofar as possible within a series format that includes a comprehensive scholarly apparatus.”

So the new edition has all the specs Cather called for, including that cream paper.