What’s the worst proofreading you’ve found in a book?
a day ago by SchmidtGenetics to c/books
I just finished reading a Star Wars Legends book, which was book 1 of the Corellian Trilogy, called “Ambush at Correlia” by Roger McBride Allen. And there was atleast 24 various typos throughout the book. From missing letters, to the wrong word, the wrong tense, wrong capitalizations, and mixed up letters.
The book is a First Edition soft cover, and I’ll leave some examples in the comments.
Wow, that's a compete change of tone.
That’s awesome, I love when authors have a bit of “sass” or flair like that.
Characters name is Jacen, not Jcen
Gonig instead of going
Glas instead of glass
Should be walked not talked
Capital I in give
I can't present proof because I did not bought the book then and the copy I have today no longer has any typos, indication of someone going through the work again and reviewing it but the worst proof-read book I ever encountered was a portuguese translation of Michael Crichton Canibals. It was so bad it felt the book, back in the early 00's had been put through a machine auto-translator and just sent direct to print.
Missing letters in words, random capitalization of words mid-sentence, ortographic errors, repeated sentences, broken paragraphs, mixed paragraphs, etc.
I should have bought and kept that book. I wish I could find a copy of that specific edition. It wasn't poorly proof-read and edited. It was cursed.
I wonder if that’s the same book the other user can’t think of.
It does get me thinking sometimes, one thing I’ve russled around is that scifi could be harder, it’s not as easy to rely to the spellcheck in Word for example. Lots of throwaway words. Simpler when writing specificly about earth and history.
But most of the books I read predate that as well, how common place was Word in 94, and would a good portion of authors use it?
My father in law worked in a print shop for fifty years. Before computers and machine translation and spell checking the process of preparing a book for print was extremely involved and went through many verification steps. Where he worked did not print sci-fi books but they did print poetry and translated texts. Proof reading was done by several people, sequencially. Print proofs were made to check for formatting. The work was done in steps planed to eliminate as many errors as possible at each stage. Computers made a lot things easier but also created new problems.
On the other hand, setting the printing press could also introduce typos as well that wasn’t in the draft.
It’s definitely not easy to print literature.
And that’s also not entirely what I’ve heard, some authors do their own proofreading and that’s it, so each publisher probably does their own thing too.
I don't have an example at hand, but I'm SO glad we're talking about this. I can always forgive a typo or two that slipped, but when a book happens to be full of mistakes, that is so annoying it plainly becomes unreadable to me. Like, did noone read it before publishing?
I can “forgive” a couple myself as well, but this was so jarring it’s basically immersion breaking.
I believe some authors self proofread, but you would think larger company like Bantam would want to do their own for QA.
Not a book, but in the early versions of the movie Heat, Al Pacino's "great ass" scene also included flecks of spittle flying off his lips. They removed it on the DVD version, which was a shame as it really did make him look unhinged.
Not exactly a typo, but still amazing.
That’s almost as bad retconning Han shooting first.
Another user mentioned Crichton as well, said theirs was Canibal, does that ring anything?
No, I don’t think I’ve read that one. I want to say it was either Terminal Man or Airframe but I can’t remember which. I just remember it was specifically a book club version because it had a bunch of discussion questions in the back.
I run Paizo APs, so I nominate all of them. I know it's from them writing chapters simultaneously so they can keep to a mo they release schedule, but some are really jarring. Currently running Triumph of the Tusk where one chapter starts with a character giving a speech to the party, despite having been killed off and replaced in the adventure background at the start of the previous chapter.
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I was having a first edition of The Mote in God's Eye signed by one of the authors, Larry Niven. He flipped it open to a page he had memorized, crossed out a word, wrote in a new one, then signed it and gave it back.
The phrase he'd altered was "They should have been spared spaced." That's "spaced" as in "they should have been thrown out an open airlock.
So that printing error would have been pretty confusing for a first-time reader of the book.
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