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.

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. This double issue was edited by Wout Dillen, Elli Bleeker, and Stefano Rosignoli.
Variants 17–18 contains essays from the consecutive GENESIS and ESTS 2022 conferences as well as essays and reviews that have been submitted outside this context but fit beautifully within the joint themes of creative revision (GENESIS) and the history and study of ancient and modern holographs (ESTS). For more context regarding the composition and publication of this issue, please refer to the Editors’ Preface.
We hope that you enjoy the research presented in this volume. If you do, you may be happy to learn that the work on our next volume is already well underway. We have a number of essays accepted and under review that are expanded full-paper versions of research presented at last year’s GENESIS conference in Taipei, the ESTS conference in Canterbury, as well as some conference independent submissions. As such, Variants 19, which is scheduled for publication in 2025, is already shaping up to be another sizeable volume of relevant research that, like our current issue, we hope will provide plenty food for thought and help inspire spirited discussions in the field.