I bought a book used. It is a horror anthology called “Final Shadows” edited by Charles Grant. It is the last in the series. It is a trade paperback.
I sat down to read it, opened the cover and was shocked to see that the book started on page 47. WTF? From the outside it looks like a normal book, so the pages were not torn out. I know that books are bound in groups of 16 pages and I presume that a few of these groups were left out.
What I would like to know:
Is this a common type of printing error?
Shouldn’t the book look funny (cover cut short or something like that)?
How often do these type of mistakes make it to the store?
Would something like this be worth any money to collectors (more than the $5.00 I paid). I would think it unlikely.
Perhaps somebody could give us a bookbinding lesson?
No clue on the questions, but I wanted to chime in and say that I once bought a book that had a good chunk of pages in the middle duplicated. It was normal long enough for me to get into the story, then went from page 147 to page 96 or something. After the duplicated section, the book continued with the pages that would have been correct.
I returned it and got another (correct) copy.
I believe the process of binding books involves pressure applied to all the gatherings (individual bunches of pages) to get them inside the cover. Certainly, traditional bookbinders I’ve seen use honkin’ great screw presses to hold everything in place while the glue dries. If you drop a couple of gatherings on the floor, well, you just wind up using slightly less pressure. If you slip a couple of extra ones in, you use more pressure. I assume your trade paperback is put together using more modern equipment, but I suspect the same principle would apply.
Not often, but it happens. I’ve got two books with similar errors - one has a bunch of pages duplicated, one has a section duplicated in place of the pages that should have gone in. I’ve got maybe two or three thousand books in total.
The one with extra pages, of course, should be fatter than normal, and you might expect the cover would be too short to fit. But it isn’t. This, and my sight of the above-mentioned honkin’ great screw presses, leads me to my conclusion that the pages are simply squeezed in until they fit. If some kind bookbinder out there wants to tell me I’m talking rubbish, I will happily listen and become better informed.
Not likely. Perhaps a really obsessive collector of variorum editions might go for it, but I’ve never heard of books being valued for defects, except maybe in very specific cases (like, a copy of the infamous “Wicked” Bible - the one that left the “not” out of “thou shalt not commit adultery” - would probably go for a fair price).
First of all those “groups of pages” everyone is talking about are called “signatures.”
Usually a signature is made by printing all its pages on one sheet of pager, which is then folded so that the pages lay in proper sequence (and with no upside-down pages!); this is then added to the other signatures that make up the book; they are then bound and trimmed. (That’s why if there is an error in the folding/trimming you will sometimes find books and mags with uncut pages.)
That describes hardbound/case bound/edition bound books.
Trade books are paperback, right??? If so, they are “perfect bound” (glue is used instead of stitching/stapling). In that case the stack of signatures get trimmed along the binding edge; then bound (glued); then trimmed along the other three edges.
It’s pretty uncommon – but not unheard of – for the layout (called “formatting” or “imposition”) person to screw up and 1) put the pages in a signature out of sequence , or upside-down, or 2) put the signatures in the book out of sequence. Also, the bindery machinery could burb and skip a signature entirely (the OP’s situation).
I don’t think such misprints are valuable, but I’m no expert there.
The term for these is “signatures.” Generally they are in some multiple of 4 or 8; I think 32 and 48 are most common for paperbacks.
**
Something like that.
**
Regarding the cover coming up short, not exactly. The width of one sig would be negligible in the total width of, say, a 400-page paperback. And the cover won’t come up short even if more extra sigs are inserted, because the spine is glued first, and then the covers are folded and trimmed with the gathered sigs all at the same time. With the bleed (image that is allowed to print beyond the trim area, so there’s no white space on the edges – commonly 1/8 inch), most people wouldn’t notice the error by looking at the cover.
This is 5-1/2 years’ experience working at a printing company talking. I did not work in the bindery, but rather in pre-press, so while I didn’t observe these machines operating, I had to understand how they work. Anyone with hands-on bindery experience is free to jump right in.
Not common, but I can see where it might happen. 16 pages is not the only possible signature length; at our publishing company we use printers that use both 32- and 24-page sigs. It sounds like the first 2 sigs are missing from the book. That’s inexcusable–either the printer should have noticed it or the production team at the publisher should have noticed it.
Shouldn’t the book look funny (cover cut short or something like that)?
Yes, it should. The spine should appear too large. Covers and books are sometimes printed in separate places. If this book is 64 pages short (47 pages and frontmatter, say), the cover should not have fit. Very odd.
How often do these type of mistakes make it to the store?
I don’t think that’s too common. Most printing houses and publishers have better quality control measures than this.