Personally, I think these edits do not preserve the meaning of the original quotes: The changed sentences stress different things than the original quotes to th

Personally, I think these edits do not preserve the meaning of the original quotes: The changed sentences stress different things than the original quotes to the extent that one could call them distortions rather than edits. From my own experience, I have seen extraordinary writers, but I have never seen an extraordinary editor: I think the reason for this is that exceptionally great editors work in such a way that their own edits most explicitly convey the original work both in its form and in its spirit, so that the editor becomes almost invisible. Invariably, the more bragging I have seen from editors in prefaces etc. about their own work on some books, the worse the result has looked to me in the sense that it had very little to do with the original, and typically felt worse to me. I think good editing is at least as hard as good writing, probably even more so because as an editor, you are working subject to more constraints, in addition to facing the same challenges that writers also face.