Friday, June 17, 2011

Y kant Blackmask spel?

As a fan of older literature which have fallen into the public domain and yet are not readily available, I've made a few Amazon purchases to try and complete my collections of authors such as John Buchan and Sax Rohmer. Unfortunately, I soon discovered some of the public domain publishers were very fly-by-night - generic covers, spelling errors, punctuation errors, pages out-of-sequence; amongst these are a few samplings by the publisher Blackmask.

But! I chanced to notice Blackmask had a copy of Sax Rohmer's Bimbashi Baruk of Egypt and its cover certainly demonstrated a superior sense of design. Clearly if some effort had been put into the cover, surely this would be reflected in the contents as well? Look at the cover!

I was so pleased by the effort Blackmask made at being creative that I missed a certain unforgiveable typo. Bimbashi Baruk of... "Eygpt?!" Does no one at Blackmask have a copy of Word they could use to run spellcheck?

Needless to say, I'm done with buying public domain books from shady publishers like these.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can't they just do a photo-facsimile of some of this stuff?

Michael Hoskin said...

You would think...

I suspect they use some sort of scanning software, given some of the more baffling typos I've observed.