missing bits of book
Dec. 2nd, 2011 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deird1Typos in books really annoy me.
This is, to some extent, expected. After all, I'm an editor. My natural inclination upon seeing a typo is to whip out a red pen, correct it, and then reprint the page. And you can't just reprint a book every time you see a mistake.
But in this case, I'm not talking so much about the mundane typos, such as this one in Harry Potter:
Which, if you think about it, clearly should have been:
Irritating, but perfectly easy to see what was meant.
It's more problematic in, for instance, Agatha Christie books. Where there are constantly lines of dialogue missing.
Seriously! It's hard to notice at first, but if you go through every two-person conversation in the book, assign one line to one person, and then alternate, you'll constantly find it changing person unexpectedly, so that someone has actually answered himself. There are all these lines of dialogue missing that were clearly supposed to be part of the conversation, but accidently left out - and no-one noticed!
And it's too late to ask the author what she'd intended to write - given that she's dead, and all.
Not having a Christie novel on hand, I can't give you an example of this conversational weirdness. I can, however, give an example of an equally irritating typo, from the book that prompted this post. It is as follows:
Given the way Pratchett's writing tends to work, I would assume that this phrasing was clearly leading up to a joke. But, instead of a joke, it's simply repeated the "worked on trolls" bit twice. Typo? I'd say so. And an irritating one - because there's a missing joke! And I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT WAS.
*grumbles*
This is, to some extent, expected. After all, I'm an editor. My natural inclination upon seeing a typo is to whip out a red pen, correct it, and then reprint the page. And you can't just reprint a book every time you see a mistake.
But in this case, I'm not talking so much about the mundane typos, such as this one in Harry Potter:
"They've already heard. Fang!"
Which, if you think about it, clearly should have been:
"They've already heard Fang!"
Irritating, but perfectly easy to see what was meant.
It's more problematic in, for instance, Agatha Christie books. Where there are constantly lines of dialogue missing.
Seriously! It's hard to notice at first, but if you go through every two-person conversation in the book, assign one line to one person, and then alternate, you'll constantly find it changing person unexpectedly, so that someone has actually answered himself. There are all these lines of dialogue missing that were clearly supposed to be part of the conversation, but accidently left out - and no-one noticed!
And it's too late to ask the author what she'd intended to write - given that she's dead, and all.
Not having a Christie novel on hand, I can't give you an example of this conversational weirdness. I can, however, give an example of an equally irritating typo, from the book that prompted this post. It is as follows:
It had been tasted by three tasters, including Sergeant Detritus, who was unlikely to be poisoned by anything that worked on humans or even by most things that worked on trolls... but probably by most things that worked on trolls.
Given the way Pratchett's writing tends to work, I would assume that this phrasing was clearly leading up to a joke. But, instead of a joke, it's simply repeated the "worked on trolls" bit twice. Typo? I'd say so. And an irritating one - because there's a missing joke! And I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT WAS.
*grumbles*
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 10:31 pm (UTC)One that drives me to wild speculation is in one of Roger Zelazny's Amber books; a line was copied from its rightful place on the left-hand page, and duplicated on the same line on the right-hand page. (Provided it's the right-sized book; it took me years to figure out, since they're almost two pages apart in my little mass-market copies.) So the narrator's brother had been crowned, and "now resided [line break] legendary unicorn of Amber." An interesting mental image, but I really doubt it's what he was going for!
The Discworld quote sounds sadly familiar, so I think my copy probably has the same typo. Alas.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 10:44 pm (UTC)*blinks* Bizarre...
There's a couple in the Temeraire books where the author clearly had a really cool paragraph and wasn't sure where to put it - so exactly the same paragraph has turned up, about five pages apart. I've noticed it three times so far!
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Date: 2011-12-01 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 11:42 pm (UTC)Yes! I was nine or ten years old when I read all of Christie, so I assumed it was just me!
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Date: 2011-12-02 12:02 am (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2011-12-02 12:16 am (UTC)But I thought that that WAS the joke?
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Date: 2011-12-02 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 02:26 am (UTC)*dark scary forest*
*Fang is howling*
Ron: [says something loudish]
Harry: "Shh! They'll hear you!"
Ron: "Hear me? They've already heard Fang!"
...or similar.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 05:23 am (UTC)But I share your distress at typos and other errors. I had to stop reading a book the other week because it repeatedly used 'affect' when it should have been 'effect'. REPEATEDLY. It was painful.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 02:54 am (UTC)"Yeah... Those wonderful people at the publishers added a proof correction but neglected to delete the bit it was correcting!"
Unfortunately, we still don't know whether the correct wording should have been "or even" or "but probably", but it's one or the other. Not both.
("Or even" is funnier, though.)
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Date: 2011-12-02 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-02 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-05 08:57 am (UTC)