A Paperness on the Floor

The last several signatures of my--hardcover--copy of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky fell out last night.

In order to save time, we are copying this rant from our archives:

They Sure Don't Make 'Em Like They Used to: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Our family copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire--our hardback family copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire--is in serious disarray. Three huge chunks of the book have fallen out of the binding: pages 53-144, pages 145-340, and pages 341-528.

And the book has not been dropped into the bathtub even once!

Curse you, Scholastic Press! Curse You!

May the curses of Anu, Enlil, and Ea descend upon the Scholastic Press! May Marduk and Sarpanitmn deal justly with those who put insufficient glue into the binding of a book! May the flocks of Scholastic Press be devoured by the lion and the leopard! May the crops of Scholastic Press by devoured by crows! May Utnapishtim the first of scribes turn his countenance from Scholastic Press! And may all their pages have at least one embarrassing typographical error!

UPDATE: The Ten-Year-Old has made a legal proffer. If informed that the statute of limitations is less than nine months, she will confess to having dropped Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire into a snowbank in Vail last Christmas vacation.

UPDATE: The Thirteen-Year-Old reports that our replacement copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is in similarly sad shape--and it has never been dropped into either a bathtub or a snowbank.

UPDATE: Ann Marie suggests that all future purchases of books by J.K. Rowling be purchases of the edition with the library binding....

Comments

Yeah, curse them for publishing a book you all liked so much you read it through several times. Curse them! The villains!

Here's a hint: Look into the increasingly monopolistic book printing and binding business sometimes. American publishing consists of thousands of publishers contending for the business of fewer and fewer printers and binders. It doesn't give the publishers a lot of leverage, even for bestselling titles like the Potter books.

Posted by: Patrick Nielsen Hayden on October 21, 2003 06:53 PM