Not Washed or Cooked, # 269

The final entry from Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings is the one that would probably have impressed Sartre least, since his idea is complicated enough without a careless error in its key phrase:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 16

Having said on the first day of mangles from this text that I’d given up on the book after the introduction, I’d also point out that there may be more errors in this first chapter than are documented here, as I was just skim-reading it to check whether it was suitable to recommend to students.

The responsibility for close-reading/editing, proof-reading and polishing texts for publication belongs to the author and publisher, of course; but it cannot truly be said that readers and buyers of this book have been treated with much respect by either, despite the fact that the Routledge’s website boasts the company to be ‘the world’s leading academic publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences’.

are are

Not Washed or Cooked, # 268

Still more from Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 12

chesnut tree

Not Washed or Cooked, # 267

More from Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 9

appartment

Not Washed or Cooked, # 266

Day Three of Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings offers this mangle:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 7

authoritive

Not Washed or Cooked, # 265

Another mangle from the introductory chapter of Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 7

meterological

Not Washed or Cooked, # 264

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:

Jean-Paul Sartre, Basic Writings, ed. by Stephen Priest (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 3

supression

Spellchecking Is Never Enough, # 84

This sublime contribution was supplied by Des Pond of Slough. The mangle occurs in the final paragraph reproduced, but inlcusion inclusion (see yesterday’s mangle) of the apostrophe-free name of this distance-learning institute was irresistible:

Link: The Writers Bureau (sic), ‘How Much can I Earn as a Proofreader?’