I'm so very disappointed with the HELP anthology that was put together for Dave Kuzminski's legal fund. And I haven't even read it yet.
I pre-ordered the hardback because I believe in the cause, and it arrived today. It took only seconds of browsing to identify several gross formatting errors that left me dismayed. Anyone with basic familiarity with Word (in which the book was presumably "typeset") knows how to fix these.
Firstly, the entire book is set in what looks like 8pt font, while the top and outside margins are huge (in fact, the entire text block looks like it's slipping down the page, with a 2" margin at the top and a normal bottom margin). A larger font size was possible without adding to the page count.
Secondly, there's a random amount of space between the end of each story and the start of the next. I can understand not starting every story on a new page for space reasons, but many of the stories start at the very bottom of the page. By some karmic stroke of irony, Eric Enck's story has the one-line title at the bottom of the page, followed by his name and the story at the top of the next page. Several stories have the first line or two of text at the bottom and the rest on the next page.
These gross errors, along with the illegible subtitle (thanks to jpg compression artifacts) on the otherwise stunning cover, make the book look amateurish and, I hate to say it, worse than those printed by the very company it scorns. (I'm not referring to the quality of the content or editing, which I haven't looked at in depth.)
There's no copyright or publication date anywhere (huh?). The Table of Contents has no page numbers (what?!) and the right column of authors' names is misaligned thanks to the misuse of tabs. The inside cover flap has multiple spelling and punctuation errors (including miscapitalization of an author's name). Ellipses are used like they're going out of style.
There's no attempt to actually format the book to look like a book. There's no running head (huh? what??!!!!), no variation in font face or size for such things as the titles and author names, and no variation in style or spacing in the frontmatter (where space is ample). There's no style anywhere, actually. Titles vary from all-caps to upper/lower case to initial cap and are "centered" across only a partial text width. The frontmatter starts on page 1 and the book proper on page 11. Pages 101 and 157 (and others, no doubt) are BLANK RECTOS?????!!
Some paragraphs are double-indented thanks (I suspect) the use of both an indent and tab. And then some indents are half the usual size. At least one story has a line space between paragraphs as well as an indent. Stories are justified but - oh, here's one set ragged right just for the hell of it. Some have straight quotes instead of smart. Text dashes are rendered as closed em-dashes, open em-dashes, en-dashes, double hyphens, spaced double hyphens, triple hyphens, and, oh my, here's a quadruple hyphen. Random stories have double spaces after the periods. An email starts out in Times and ends in Courier.
Every one of these formatting inconsistences can be fixed with a global search and replace by someone who understands Word.
I'm sorry, but this book is ugly and horrible. It's a HELP anthology for and by a publishing community... Why didn't the people who put this together ask for HELP from people who know what they were doing in book publishing?
I truly hope that those responsible will take the pride in their work necessary to reformat the book before Lulu.com prints any more, thus saving future buyers the shock and discomfort of leafing through this book.
I pre-ordered the hardback because I believe in the cause, and it arrived today. It took only seconds of browsing to identify several gross formatting errors that left me dismayed. Anyone with basic familiarity with Word (in which the book was presumably "typeset") knows how to fix these.
Firstly, the entire book is set in what looks like 8pt font, while the top and outside margins are huge (in fact, the entire text block looks like it's slipping down the page, with a 2" margin at the top and a normal bottom margin). A larger font size was possible without adding to the page count.
Secondly, there's a random amount of space between the end of each story and the start of the next. I can understand not starting every story on a new page for space reasons, but many of the stories start at the very bottom of the page. By some karmic stroke of irony, Eric Enck's story has the one-line title at the bottom of the page, followed by his name and the story at the top of the next page. Several stories have the first line or two of text at the bottom and the rest on the next page.
These gross errors, along with the illegible subtitle (thanks to jpg compression artifacts) on the otherwise stunning cover, make the book look amateurish and, I hate to say it, worse than those printed by the very company it scorns. (I'm not referring to the quality of the content or editing, which I haven't looked at in depth.)
There's no copyright or publication date anywhere (huh?). The Table of Contents has no page numbers (what?!) and the right column of authors' names is misaligned thanks to the misuse of tabs. The inside cover flap has multiple spelling and punctuation errors (including miscapitalization of an author's name). Ellipses are used like they're going out of style.
There's no attempt to actually format the book to look like a book. There's no running head (huh? what??!!!!), no variation in font face or size for such things as the titles and author names, and no variation in style or spacing in the frontmatter (where space is ample). There's no style anywhere, actually. Titles vary from all-caps to upper/lower case to initial cap and are "centered" across only a partial text width. The frontmatter starts on page 1 and the book proper on page 11. Pages 101 and 157 (and others, no doubt) are BLANK RECTOS?????!!
Some paragraphs are double-indented thanks (I suspect) the use of both an indent and tab. And then some indents are half the usual size. At least one story has a line space between paragraphs as well as an indent. Stories are justified but - oh, here's one set ragged right just for the hell of it. Some have straight quotes instead of smart. Text dashes are rendered as closed em-dashes, open em-dashes, en-dashes, double hyphens, spaced double hyphens, triple hyphens, and, oh my, here's a quadruple hyphen. Random stories have double spaces after the periods. An email starts out in Times and ends in Courier.
Every one of these formatting inconsistences can be fixed with a global search and replace by someone who understands Word.
I'm sorry, but this book is ugly and horrible. It's a HELP anthology for and by a publishing community... Why didn't the people who put this together ask for HELP from people who know what they were doing in book publishing?
I truly hope that those responsible will take the pride in their work necessary to reformat the book before Lulu.com prints any more, thus saving future buyers the shock and discomfort of leafing through this book.
