What's the biggest editorial mistake you've seen?

Ayn Rand

Medievalist said:

Ayn Rand

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Good one.

H. Rider Haggard's greatest fictional hero is either Allan Quatermain or Allan Quartermain, depending on the book and which edition.

I once read a star wars booked that had spelt Han Solo's first name as "Ham" that was pretty funny, lol.

I once came across half a chapter that had clearly been cut-and-pasted into the wrong place in the book. This was a work of one of the big names -- not Reichs, but the other forensic series, the one with the FBI niece.

I read a book a few years ago--it was actually a TV book club selection, though I didn't know that when I bought it--so littered with inconsistencies my reading became a game of "Spot the error."

The MC's age changed repeatedly: She was seventeen, the eighteen, then seventeen, then twenty due to addition/subtraction with the original age given for her mother, which also changed from 35 to 37 to 34.

In one scene a character is described as sitting on a couch with the hems of her trousers wet from rain. At the end of that scene she stands up and smooths her skirt.

The MC is spending the night at a friend's house, and she has a thing for the friend's brother. A chapter ends with a line about how they said goodnight and she didn't see him again for several weeks. The next chapter is about how awkward it was to see him at breakfast the very next morning.

Those are the ones I can remember offhand, and I read the book five years ago, I think. There were more. There were a lot more. I'm not one to say books read like they haven't been edited or whatever, because everybody makes mistakes, but in this case I honestly seriously had to wonder if anyone had read through it before publication. Those were not small errors, they were major continuity issues.

The idea that a popular TV show actually picked it for their book club, even with the myriad mistakes, still makes me very sad. I didn't watch the show, so don't know if the problems were mentioned on it, but I somehow doubt they were.

I nearly let a continuity issue slip into with my next book. It was from a chapter I had rewritten countless times and neither the copy editor nor the production editor caught it, so I'm glad I did. In one paragraph I have a dog being sent down a cliff with a kid character, and in the next paragraph the dog is back up on top of the cliff. Spouted wings? Teleported?

I once failed to spot the word HAPINESS in big 20pt bold type right in the middle of the page. Some sort of irony.

The Wicked Bible is probably the all-time winner, with its reinterpretation of the seventh commandment:

Thou shalt commit adultery.

Caught an error in the book I was reading last night. The story ends with the protagonist's birthday on July 26. However many of the events of the book -- which are supposed to happen before his birthday -- happen in August.

I've mentioned this before, but I read a story in Glimmer Train where the author put University of Michigan in East Lansing. NOT COOL.

My sister found one in a book where a Muslim character made a vow by swearing on Allah's grave. She was bummed out for several weeks about it because she didn't even realize God was dead.

Mistress Elysia said:

I have to say, getting names wrong is probably the least of Laurell K. Hamilton's problems...

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The name thing has happened to me. The book was edited, desk edited, copy edited and proofed and none of us caught it. I had a minor character called Roberta - mentioned about twice. As one of the main characters was called 'Roberts' I changed 'Roberta' to 'Ruby'. Only in the first edition she was called 'Roberta' at the top of the page and 'Ruby' at the bottom... so it goes.

I also don't usually think of them as terrible things and they don't usually jar me from the novel... unless it makes me burst out laughing. In which case I was glad it existed. I've written a few errors on first drafts that were hilarious, but none have gone through professional editors.

I remember reading a book once, though I cannot remember a name or author, in which a character actually 100% changed genders a quarter of the way through. The character name was fantasy, so it doesn't jump out as female or male, but all of a sudden the man had boobs and a skimpy dress.

I'm not sure I'd call this an editorial mistake as much as something the writer never should have done, but... I read the first book in a fantasy series that had a lovely descriptive paragraph. So lovely, in fact, that when I read book two the next day, the exact same paragraph, word for word, made its reappearance. I mean, really? The author as he was cutting and pasting didn't think anyone would ever notice, or that it didn't matter?

In one of James Patterson's book, the tense shifts from present tense to past tense mid-scene and mid-chapter. I'm so surprised -- did the editor fall asleep? What's more surprising is that no one seemed to catch it or care -- the same mistake propagated to subsequent editions. I guess Patterson is so big that no one dare to edit his work?