Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
I say that as someone who loved the original The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, a notoriously difficult book for many to read .... hence the friendlier version that was later released. I loved the archaic language, all the thees and thous etc. |
A sad story for me, when reading my paperback of The Night Land.
I got to the end of a perfectly good looking paperback (everything intact), to discover the last 100 or so pages were missing. The story stopped mid sentence. Very clearly a printing error.
Of course, I'd bought the paperback long before I started to read it, and the store I bought it from was no longer in existence.
I hunted high and low to get a replacement so I could finish the story, but all I eventually found, was that edited version, second hand, with all the thees and thous replaced. So I was forced to use that to finish the story .... I was not a happy chappy, but at least I was able to finish the story.
This was long before ebooks and the wonder of the Gutenberg Project, where I later picked up the full original version.
I've had the odd printer issue with books. Just the other day, in The Elfstones Of Shannara, two pages were in the wrong order, midway through the book.
Another one I also remember very well, that had no happy ending, was the second novel (Stone of Farewell) in the Tad Williams trilogy - Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I'd just started reading a fight scene, and it stopped mid sentence, with several pages missing from the book. It was brand new book, a Trade paperback version, and every other Trade paperback had the same error. I collected that whole trilogy as Trade paperbacks ... the third and final book being small print, thin pages ... and very very thick. So thick, that the regular paperback version was split into two. Tad Williams fought hard and long to get the version I got (and the hard cover) as a single book.
Of course, I was deep into the Stone of Farewell story at the time, and so elected to keep going. I was very peeved though, and I still don't have a paper replacement ... never read the full fight scene. At least when I get around to a re-read there are other options now, with the advent of ebooks.