I’ve never used the Annotated Lolita as a primary text in an undergraduate course for precisely the reasons Matt describes – it just gives too much away for first-time readers (as Appel must surely have known, figuring that most readers would come to the annotated version only after reading it at least once before, piquing their interest).  Instead, whenever I’ve been teaching a course just on Nabokov, I always use the terrific Library of America edition, which helpfully glosses the French and other non-English phrasings in Brian Boyd’s useful notes and which includes the full (and judiciously annotated) texts of Pnin, Pale Fire, and Nabokov’s screenplay to Lolita at a price little or no more than it would cost to buy the three novels in the Vintage editions (making the screenplay a nice little bonus).  Certainly, it’s hard to justify the LoA edition if you’re teaching a course (e. g. The American Novel) in which Lolita is the only Nabokov text, but in that case, I’ve taken to using Knopf’s Everyman’s Library edition, which usually costs little more than the Vintage and which uses better quality paper that won’t be fading to a thin yellow by the time the students graduate.  You have to warn the students to read only John Ray’s foreword before commencing the novel and save Martin Amis’s until they’ve finished it , and you still have to decide how to handle the non-English phrases (the Everyman’s edition has no notes), but in those situations, I’ve found that the students will ask about the phrasings they most need to know the meaning of, so I just allow a few minutes of every class to explain the non-English passages – which tend to make good discussion-sparkers anyway.

But no matter what you do, Matt, if your experience is at all like mine over the years, you’ll find it hard to go very far wrong with this inexhaustibly entertaining and instructive text.  Enjoy.

Brian Walter