Worst editing you've ever seen in a book?

ixoy

What's the worst editing you've come across in a book? I'm focusing on one aspect of editing - the quality of the published product from a layout/typo perspective. Nothing comes close to the current print of Neal Asher's "The Engineer [Reconditioned]".

To start with it's got a large number of typos. The punctuation is very haphazard (maybe they'll close those quotation marks, maybe they won't etc).

I could have dealt with that. What really stood out though is the fact this is a book of short stories. Each story would have its own introduction. Glancing at the table of contents you see there's five short stories. Nope. There's nine. One of these stories is quite easy to find - it's still got its introduction piece and is clearly marked in the book, just not listed in the table of contents.
Three of the other stories however... they not only don't merit a place in the contents, but in fact are continued in a new paragraph right after the preceding story. There's no clear mark at all where one ends and the next begins. It's very off putting! I mean how could this huge mess have slipped through any sort of quality assurance?

What's the worst example other people here have found?

Permabear

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kylith

The worst I've ever come across was in a kids book several years ago where one of the chapters appeared twice.

The worst I've ever heard about was a German (iirc) printers who put ads into the text of some Pratchett novels. It was something like "I bet now our heroes would like a bowl of soup from Gunther's Soup House on Whatever Strasse".

Amazotheamazing

Picked up a bootleg copy of Ulysses in a bookshop in Delhi, was hard to work out which spelling mistakes were intentional and which came down to the magic of the Indian typesetter. There was supposed to be some spelling mistakes in the book, right?

The Mad Hatter

Amazotheamazing wrote: »

Picked up a bootleg copy of Ulysses in a bookshop in Delhi, was hard to work out which spelling mistakes were intentional and which came down to the magic of the Indian typesetter. There was supposed to be some spelling mistakes in the book, right?

The 1922 edition was typeset in France by people who presumably didn't speak perfect English, and as a result that edition is a mess. Later editions had quite a few errors as well, but not as many, as far as I'm aware.

Permabear

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Earthhorse

Not sure if this counts but a friend bought me a Neil Gaiman graphic novel "Signal to Noise" as a present last year and there were so many typos in it that began to wonder whether it was done on purpose.

The main character is a man dying of cancer and I thought the typos might be a representation of his diminishing health or something

. As I finished it, I turned over the last page to the back cover and the pages literally came out of the binding (though that's hardly the editor's fault).

I also have a copy of the Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver and around half way through it basically jumps back a few dozen pages, so at page 163, say, you have page 93 again, and all the material in between is reprinted. Thought that's one big mistake rather than a collection of errors.

The Mad Hatter

Earthhorse wrote: »

Not sure if this counts but a friend bought me a Neil Gaiman graphic novel "Signal to Noise" as a present last year and there were so many typos in it that began to wonder whether it was done on purpose.

The main character is a man dying of cancer and I thought the typos might be a representation of his diminishing health or something

. As I finished it, I turned over the last page to the back cover and the pages literally came out of the binding (though that's hardly the editor's fault).

I haven't read Signal to Noise, but I'd be surprised if they weren't deliberate - Gaiman usually copy-edits his own work scrupulously.

I also have a copy of the Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver and around half way through it basically jumps back a few dozen pages, so at page 163, say, you have page 93 again, and all the material in between is reprinted. Thought that's one big mistake rather than a collection of errors.

That seems more like a printing error than an editing one. Probably only happened to a handful of copies.

Eliot Rosewater

I haven't seen this personally, but recently there was a cookbook published that included a recipe calling for, as an ingredient, "ground black people". Pretty misfortunate!


(I don't know if this counts and, yes, I've posted this link before. )

Qualitymark

I've happily started collecting some little beauties in modern books, but my favourite is from an Indian book from a small press. Obviously hand-typeset in hot metal (the rows of type waver like a field of corn), the introduction describes the author as "Editor of a reputed quarterly of the arts".