"You Shall Know Our Velocity!" (2002) & "Sacrament" (2003)

Although we take revision for granted in non-narrative books -- reference works are regularly updated, and some pass through yearly revisions -- it's something of an unspoken assumption among readers that revisions in narrative works are supposed to happen before publication. Pre-publication revisions can be utterly radical in nature -- take, for instance, Gordon Lish's absolutely staggering edits on Raymond Carver (pictured below, from the New York Times -- click the image for a larger version):

... but they still largely become accepted as the "real" book. Upon publication, their identity becomes fixed: once the story's told, we don't want it to change from underneath us.

This makes a certain commercial sense: a revised reference work can be sold again and again to the same buyer, but probably not the same story. Publishers are generally not overly fond of revised editions of stories, because it involves the expense and trouble of repagination and a whole new copyediting process, and all for what is (for most narratives) a diminishing pool of new readers.

There are some workarounds, in practice: writers can quietly amend their text in a minor way when a paperback edition comes out, particularly if it doesn't alter the pagination. Errors belatedly discovered while reading aloud on tour then magically vanish; and the paragraph where you inadvertently used the same word three times gets fixed.  There's a similar opportunity, less often taken advantage of, when a foreign edition comes out.

But it's the rare author that really ventures further.  Mary Shelley changed Frankenstein in 1831; in 1977 John Fowles added 70 pages and altered the ending of his 1965 novel The Magus.  And if you look beyond prose storytelling, Walt Whitman famously turned Leaves of Grass into a lifelong revision project. 

In theory, the advent of e-books should have made texts more fluid and mutable; something like Leaves of Grass can be expressed in all its multiplicity.  And yet authors and readers still generally leave stories alone.  Maybe the authors just want to move on to the next thing; and most readers, like music listeners, don't seem to want that Phil Spector production stripped out of Let It Be. And maybe, god forbid, the first editor was actually right: A Moveable Feast, by many accounts, did not necessarily benefit from from its very posthumous 2009 "restoration" by Hemingway's grandson.  

For better or worse, the first published version largely becomes the artwork's identity.

So when a novel is revised, as in the 2002 novel You Shall Know Our Velocity!, it stands out. In a 2003 variant titled Sacrament, Eggers made a significant change to the midsection of the book, as he noted in the McSweeney's promo text for the book: "This one is about 60 pages longer, the added pages having been written by the book's other primary character, Hand. His insertion, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the book, in many ways refutes the way the story was originally told. The new version of the book has a new title and many more photographs, all in color."

When Vintage put out the paperback (left), Hand's counter-text was gone again -- as were the color photos inside -- but other smaller revisions had been worked in.

Not only does the variant version mess with the reader's sense of the book's editions having a stable text, it also questions -- two-thirds of the way in -- whether the narrator and the premise you've just spent a couple hundred pages getting to know is in fact trustworthy. It becomes, in effect, a different book -- and, maybe suitably enough, briefly gains a new title as a result.