Defects you've found in books you've read

Victoria Silverwolf

Victoria Silverwolf

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Well, there I was, on page 246 out of 404, in Poul Anderson's 1978 novel The Avatar. Suddenly, the next page seemed awfully familiar. I glanced at the page number.

Pages 247 through 278 are missing in my copy. Instead, pages 119 through 146 are repeated.

To assuage my frustration, I instead offer this topic.

Have you experienced other book defects that prevented reading?
 
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Twice, both were new books.
The first time it went from chapter 12 straight to 15, page numbers weren't missing.
Second, parts of the book was in a foreign language, to be fair that one was a pre copy Rune, who used to post here regular sent that had been translated to English.
 
How old were these books? I thought most would be printed from a PDF these days, so you'd think this would be impossible.

(Having said that, it has happened to me too, but a long time ago.)
 
Not sure if it counts as a defect, but I picked up (for free, fortunately) a trad published book which had, only 13 pages in, a paragraph of speech immediately followed by the very same paragraph with only a few minor variations. It was clearly an editing mistake, but to me symptomatic of something tossed off quickly and without care, which was mirrored in everything else I'd read (an over-portentous prologue, prose so purple I feared my eyes would be seeing violet for the rest of the day, action that was like wading through treacle, and unpleasant characters) so I gave up there and then.
 
It didn't prevent me from reading it, but when I received my copy of The Goddess Project, there was a huge vertical slice down the front of the book, as if the Amazon warehouse gonk armed with the boxcutter had been a tad overexuberant in opening the boxes that day.
 
Dan Jones said:
It didn't prevent me from reading it, but when I received my copy of The Goddess Project, there was a huge vertical slice down the front of the book, as if the Amazon warehouse gonk armed with the boxcutter had been a tad overexuberant in opening the boxes that day.
Click to expand...
More likely that was Tashi
 
Yes, in one of my William Horwood books, there's a couple of pages repeated with pages missing.

(Annoyingly, I have something similar with my Downton Abbey box set - got two disc threes and no disc two!)
 
I had the Dean Koontz paperback Mr Murder where whole sections were not glued in properly so those sections would fall out sometimes.
 
Yes, I've owned defective books. I've given it away, but I had a copy of the first edition of Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth that had to be read back to front, and perhaps held upside down. I remember another book from which a sequence of pages was missing, but I don't remember which book that was.
 
Few years ago I got a copy of Hogfather by Sir Terry Pratchett and 100 pages of it were missing and instead they reprinted 100 earlier pages. Suffice to say even a dedicated attempt to read on was thwarted with such an error.
 
Yep! found many problems in books over the years; don't thingk I ever ran across missing chapters though.
In the old days before computers) it was usually missing/repeated sentences, words, or pages, more often it was print defects where parts of the sentences/letters/words were missing.
Used to find occasional page corners that were folded over before the pages were trimmed.
Have also experienced binding problems on new books (the seller normally replaces them without an issue).
More recently there are occasional, apparent, scanning & optical character recognition (OCR) issues on some E-books even from legitimate publishers... However these issues seem to have largely gone away as publishing becomes primarily electronic, and hard copy becomes less prevalent.

Enjoy!
 
I had saved my copy of James S.A. Corey's Babylon's Ashes to read when I was on holiday in the fall. I love the Expanse series and wanted to savour it on vacation time. Well, I got to about page 200 or so and found that the story abruptly jumped ahead. Apparently 80 pages were misplaced from the binding. A real bummer when you are miles from a store. I read it anyway and returned it at the point of purchase for another copy when I got home.
 
I had the same problem years ago, with John Varley's Steel Beach -- it was missing a section, with another section repeated in its place. It wasn't until I worked for a newspaper that I found out how that happens. Or at least how it happens with newspapers, in the age of computers -- I'm sure it was something equivalent at the time. It's when the template is linked to the wrong set of pages, usually because you've been messing with the template and duplicating signatures (that's what they call a set of pages as they go on the plate) and the links are still going to the old set, so it makes two of the same signature and leaves out the one that's supposed to be there.

Barnes & Noble was rather difficult about the whole thing, when I had to exchange it.
 
Victoria Silverwolf said:
Well, there I was, on page 246 out of 404, in Poul Anderson's 1978 novel The Avatar. Suddenly, the next page seemed awfully familiar. I glanced at the page number.

Pages 247 through 278 are missing in my copy. Instead, pages 119 through 146 are repeated.

To assuage my frustration, I instead offer this topic.

Have you experienced other book defects that prevented reading?
Click to expand...

This is very common in manufacture.
When I was stock manager at a branch of Waterstones, the procedure was to title-page the faulty book, send it off for a credit, then put the book in the staff room. I still have many faulty books in my library...
 
My copy of Agatha Christie's Poirot Loses A Client had a page (maybe more than one, can't remember) so poorly printed I to buy a used copy to finish it. I also have what might be called a positive defect. The horror anthology Cutting Edge edited by Dennis Etchison came with a double cover. An additional cover, unglued, was wrapped around the original so snuggly I didn't notice it right away. When it slipped off as the checker was ringing it up she almost threw it in the garbage. I had to talk fast to have her let me keep it.
 
I bought the ebook of The Painted Man by Peter V Brett - and towards the end, I'm sure I found the same section of text repeated over a couple of chapters. Not just a few lines, but a good-sized paragraph. It's definitely not the sort of thing I would have expected to normally get past the editors!
 
There were about 30-40 pages missing from the copy of Tad Williams' The Stone of Farewell I was reading. I seemed to remember it skipped between paragraphs in a way that didn't make it immediately obvious that something was missing, but before long I noticed that the characters had managed to discover a hidden city without me noticing.

The second copy I tried to read of it had exactly the same problem, fortunately I was able to borrow a complete copy from a friend.
 
I managed to make my way through my copy of The Avatar despite more than thirty pages missing, and it didn't made much difference. That's because the second part of the book has the characters teleporting, literally at random, from one place in space and time to another. Overall, the book was so-so.
 
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