Not long ago, I overheard a couple of senior academics expressing regret that they had been unable to add a recently-published book to the reading list because, while the author’s ideas were excellent and the topic rarely addressed, the text was so filled with errors that it simply could not be recommended to students. The key problem, they agreed, was the demise of copy-editing in academic publishing houses.
This rot set in some time ago. The next few days’ mangles are devoted to the introductory chapter of a collection of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings that I was reading — until I had to abandon it shy of page 20 — with a view to adding it to a reading list. The book, targeted specifically at students, was originally published in 2001, when spell-checkers had long been standard. Puzzlingly, the reprint of 2005 reproduced most of the errors I had found in this edition. Here is the first of them:
This rot set in some time ago. The next few days’ mangles are devoted to the introductory chapter of a collection of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings that I was reading — until I had to abandon it shy of page 20 — with a view to adding it to a reading list. The book, targeted specifically at students, was originally published in 2001, when spell-checkers had long been standard. Puzzlingly, the reprint of 2005 reproduced most of the errors I had found in this edition. Here is the first of them:
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| Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 3 |
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