The ESTS is happy to announce a new issue of Variants, the peer-reviewed journal of The European Society for Textual Scholarship, published in Open Access via the OpenEdition platform at https://journals.openedition.org/variants. The theme of this issue, edited by Wout Dillen, Elsa Pereira, and Stefano Rosignoli, is “Authors and their Drafts in Context”. Unlike previous themed issues in our series, this title does not repeat the theme of a specific past ESTS conference that set the issue in motion and determined its call for papers. Instead, we picked this title because different combinations of “authors”, “drafts”, and their “contexts” appear in each of the essays, and because the title combines elements of the themes of two conferences that are featured in the current issue: ESTS 2023 (Canterbury, UK) and GENESIS 2023 (Taipei, Taiwan). For more context regarding the composition and publication of this issue, please refer to the Editors’ Preface.
We hope that you enjoy the contributions carefully compiled here and look forward to the publication of Variants 20, which we are preparing for publication in 2026 as we speak.