Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading Roal Dahl's The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my daughter Eleonora, and I found it infuriating how poor the typesetting and the editing was (not to mention the quality of the paper).
I mean, these are books that have been sold in their hundreds of thousands, if not in their millions, and reprinted umpteen times according to their copyright pages. Yet they are full of the ugliest orphans, widows and gappy lines, the narration is mangled by lazy repetitions, and there's even a few bad typos… Surely they receive letters, as we do, pointing out mistakes? Why didn't they bother to correct them in all these years? Grrrr… We deserve better...
AG
I'd say the print-ready files this publisher is using are the same ones they have used for previous editions with only cursory changes made to the copyright page.
ReplyDeleteA practice many large publishers continue to lazily do when they do large print runs of classic back catalogue titles. It wouldn't surprise me if the print files have been untouched (re-edited) in more than five years.