There are two versions of the original 1931 Manuscript of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson by G. Gurdjieff (in the sense of correcting typos and punctuation only). This book, shown in the adjacent image, is a revision of our original version. In that version, where there was disparity, Gurdjieff’s neologisms were substituted for the ones that appeared in the 1950 publication of The Tales.

This version is,  for the most part, unchanged from the original manuscript that was published in a limited edition in 1931 under the direction of A. R. Orage. It was necessary to make some changes for the sake of structure and readability, but otherwise, it is almost identical.

The text of The 1931 Manuscript is significantly different to the 1950 version of the Tales in some areas, including the appearance of a whole part-chapter on Termosses, which is not found in the later 1950 published version. The text is significantly different in places and in a few places the order of the content is different at the paragraph level. Reading The 1931 Manuscript at times feels as though one is reading a different book, but one that nevertheless was forged by Gurdjieff himself.