Thanks for the Luddite manual, Thal - funnily enough, I already knew most of it!
And Hammer! You wouldn't
believe how many typos there were! A natural result, I suppose, of the manual being hand-copied by candlelight in ochre ink on dodgy home-made parchment!
Actually I recently read a book called
A Line of Dogs by Gary Morris (an Aussie). It was a good enough story and reasonably well-written, but the errors were truly appalling. Possessive apostrophes inside pronouns, quotes that start and don't finish, quotes within quotes with inappropriate grammar, full stops missing, even Sir Arthur Denison is variously rendered as Dennison, Denisson and Denison.
I wrote to the author and
begged him to have his novel professionally proofed before going into another printing, and asked if it was perhaps self-published? After all, a 650 page book with over a thousand errors and typos is totally unacceptable. I even offered to do it for him.
I got a snippy letter back from his publishers, Polar Publishing, saying it HAD BEEN professionally proofread by a guy who has since died of cancer. Obviously the drugs were getting to him, if indeed he was a professional and not just an amateur pedant. The letter said the proofreader had not wanted to change Gary's "Voice" too much, and that the book WAS in its second printing.
Well, these typos had nothing to do with the author's "voice" and everything to do with sloppiness and lack of ability. So I wrote back and told them so.
The publishing house I belong to would NEVER consider printing something so sloppy, and I told them that, too.
I'm so popular these days.
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