WHEN PEOPLE MOVE ON FROM THEIR STUDIES, ‘THE NORTON’ STAYS WITH THEM.

updates were no more than a moneymaking scheme designed to force them into buying the most recent edition. Did Chaucer add another knight to the Canterbury Tales? Has Sir Walter Ralegh written something new?

And yet when people move on from their studies, “the Norton” is often one of the things that stays with them, all 5,000+ bound onionskin pages trundled from apartment to apartment in their post-grad years. Writing in the Post in 2011, Mireille Silcoff recalled being comforted by the poetry of John Donne in the pages of her 20-year-old Norton while in hospital.

Children’s author Sally Nicholls says it’s her desert-island book. In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, scholar Abdul Sattar Jawad at Baghahd University told a reporter that when the bombs started falling, “I will have the Norton Anthology of English Literature in my lap.” Writer Allan Fotheringham once suggested it as an ideal gift “for anyone who has the slightest interest in the English language.” And writing in the Edmonton Journal in 1991, Helen Metella was reaching for a metaphor to describe the lyrics of Loreena McKennitt and wondered “where I’d stashed my Norton Anthology of English Literature.”

In 2012, Abrams told the New York Times: “One of the pleasures of being an editor of the anthology is to meet middle-aged people who say: I still have the Norton Anthology that I used 20 years ago. I have it at my bed’s head, and I read it at night, and I enjoy it.” He must have got that a lot.