This old-spelling edition of Don Quixote is the first ever to take all the typographical and textual evidence into consideration. It provides scholars with a text closer to that of Cervantes's original manuscript than any previous edition and includes:
- detailed bibliographical descriptions of the copies of the first editions used as editor's copy;
- all pertinent information concerning the editorial policy;
- detailed and complete lists of all the readings replaced, set side by side with the editorial corrections;
- a text that reproduces the non-incidental seventeenth-century typographical and orthographic peculiarities of the first editions; and
- sequential line numbering for the entire text and bibliographical data pertaining to the part, section or chapter, signature, and first (fifth, tenth, etc.) line of the text of the first editions.