false 5022130 190521197X 9781905211975 25 9 http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5022130.Curiosities_of_Literature 1451 John Sutherland 968 163 0 0 false Fri Nov 06 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 02 15:26:15 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 10 16:11:47 -0800 2009
This is even worse in its proofreading and typesetting errors than How to Read a Novel. It is rife with stray commas (”Baird’s Trilby is, significantly like …” p. 86; “downstream, exploitation” p. 197) and even commas instead of words (”Is the Potter effect, good thing?” p. 215*). AIDS is rendered as Aids. Most egregiously, toward the end of the book, a glyph began to supplant single quotation marks.** The house font where I once worked was incomplete. When you viewed nonprinting characters in Microsoft Word, you’d see a rectangular glyph instead of the usual dot that indicates a space. I have never seen, even in faux Austen sequels from vanity presses, such a glyph in a printed book.

Aggravated, I checked the book’s front matter, registering the change of house and seeing that it was printed in China. That didn’t strike me as unusual or problematic, since just about everything is made in China. So I just now pulled two recent hardcovers (‘Tis and Order of the Phoenix, since they were in immediate, non-cockatiel-disturbing reach), and both were printed in the United States (the McCourt says “manufactured”). So maybe printing in China is another proof that Skyhorse is a cut-rate house.

Sutherland says it’s interesting to teach reading to non-literary folk like Cal Tech students. He told of one student who dismissed an entire novel because the welding or soldering the protagonist used to smuggle his weapon on the undercarriage of his car wouldn’t work. For that reader, because of that minor metallurgical detail, the book was broken, didn’t cohere, didn’t work. I empathize.

* The Potter effect is a bad thing in this book since its “manufacturer” didn’t know how to typeset a fraction. It’s not 93 quarters ($23.25!) but 9¾, 9.75.

** Which are stupid anyway. ‘Tis might be a contraction for “it is” or it might be the start of dialogue. A line of speech might read …We should be careful of the others’ but you don’t know whether that others is possessive or the end of the speech. It’s craziness!]]>