I just returned from my local Barnes & Noble and I’m pissed. Not at B&N but at the bastids that make books.
I’ve noticed a trend with publishers in the last year or so to not trim the open (right) edge of the paper on hardback books.
Back in the day, the only copies of books with the ragged edge were the cheaper, book club versions. Now it seems that $29.95 is not enough money to pay for a book and have trimmed edges.
I know this is lame for the pit, but I detest raggedy edges on my books. There’s nothing like the feel of a book in my hands. How much could that one last trim of the paper cost, ferchrissakes?
I don’t know what the deal with that is. If they save money doing it this way, or if it’s just a stylish new way to make books. But either way, I don’t like it.
Since I interned At Time Warner Book Group, I can tell answer this question.
What you are refering to is known as a rough cut, and it 100% syle choice. It is suposed to add a older aged quality to the books. From my own ex[erinace, its mostly been used with more literay books (stuff you’d find from Little Brown and Co.) but it does show up in the more comerical stuff too.
Hells yes, those are the ones that deserve the pit rant.
Errors happen. They shouldn’t, but they do. And some I can forgive. If a character has a weird name, and it’s spelled incorrectly once, that’s tolerable.
But how in the flaming fucking pits of hell can the word “teh” slip by? I mean, fuck, it’s not like a spell checker wouldn’t catch that!
If you look at a hardback book, the edge of the pages opposite the spine, normally where you actually touch the paper to turn the page.
A fine book will have trimmed, smooth edges on the paper on all three visible edges. The expensive classics can also be gilded in gold on the edges.
The crappy books I’m bitching about are trimmed on the top and bottom edges but are left ragged on the right edge.
Like I said in the OP, my experience is that only the cheaper, book club versions have historically been printed this way. I detest paying full price for a “sub-standard” product.
Aughhh the Fagles translation of Odyssey and Iliad both have the rough edges and the difficulty of smoothly turning the pages was driving me nuts!
Note: I’m one of those who sort of bends the book in a slight arc and, instead of grasping a page with my hand and “turning it”, I simply slide my thumb slightly down, releasing the page and allowing it to float gently over to the other side. The torn edges make this impossible. Gah.
BTW the reason for the Rough Edges= Old Timey Look thing is that many old books originally came with the pages uncut- the pages were sewn into the binding as one LONG sheet of paper folded again and again.
There is a certain movie- I’m trying to remember the damn’d title- that shows a character in the 1890’s reading a book and cutting each page open with a knife as he goes.
On a side note, seeing “teh” in a manuscript warms my little heart in a way, because it tells me that the correctly spelled words in the text were spelled by hand, by a good speller (writer or proofer). You know they didn’t use spellcheck.
Now that explains something-when I was back in college, I found some old books in the library-I mean really old. Some of them had pages stuck together at the top like that!
Hijack
While we are complaining about books; IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK TO GET A BOOK THAT IS NOT PART ONE OF THE “NEW BESTSELLING SERIES OF IT’S KIND”?! Back in my day, even serial novels ended a damn story-arc within one novel.
