Oddest Book Cover Mistake I've Ever Seen

Cafe Society
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Most book collectors know of famous mistakes that make books more valuable. Books have pages or whole sections missing or upside down. Some books have even misspelled the author’s name.

The worst mistakes usually never make it out the door, though. They get pulped and new books printed.

I just took a book out of the library that has the biggest, worst, and most unusual mistake I’ve ever seen get out into the public.

It’s an obscure 1981 academic book from the MIT Press, so it’s not going to make any headlines. It’s so obscure that I had to do some serious searching to find even one example of it online. Most images of the book use the paperback cover. Every one on Amazon does and all the ones on Abebooks. I finally found the original hardback, though. Here’s a picture of the cover.

You can see that it’s a series of sepia portraits of old-time women. Appropriate, since the book is titled Grand Domestic Revolution: History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. It’s by Dolores Hayden.

You probably know that colored images are printed by a multi-color process. Usually a series of inks in cyan, magenta, and yellow are laid down, followed by black ink to finish off the cover. (Either white ink can be used or areas can be “dropped out” of darker backgrounds for contrast.) That’s called four-colored printing and it’s the standard.

The copy of the book I have has the magenta ink. And that’s it. The pictures are there. But the title isn’t. The author isn’t. The spine is bare. The inside flaps are bare. Every word that would normally be in black ink or dropped out against the dark background is missing.

How does a book with no title or author get by anyone to be purchased by a library? I can’t imagine.

It’s also one of the very few standard-sized books I have ever seen that is printed in two columns to a page. The text has two columns. The Table of Contents has two columns,. The footnotes have two columns. Maybe the art director went insane during the printing process and got locked away before anyone noticed that the cover was only half printed.

If you’re not a Book Person, you can’t understand how weird this all is. If you are, let me tell you, this is Weird. I’ve seen tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of books and I’ve never seen this before.

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Wow, that’s kind of eerie. A little shiver went down my spine as I was reading this post.

Definitely beats the oddest one I’ve seen, which was - emblazoned in large serif capital letters across the entire spine of a textbook - the word CHEMISRTY.

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Sounds like the black plate has been left out during the printing process. Happens sometimes, I’ve seen it on ads in magazines and newspapers, but never on a book cover.

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White ink? That’s an extreme rarity, and used only for effect.

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When the covers were being printed, two sheets stuck together as the black (and perhaps other colors) were being laid down. Automated machinery tended by inattentive workers then wrapped this cover onto the boards where it was sprayed with polyurethane waterproofing, and shortly thereafter a dust cover was slipped onto the book. That dust cover was the only thing visible as the volume was packed and shipped to the library, where it was promptly cataloged—and the dust cover was discarded. The cataloging clerk noticed the odd cover, but that’s not how people choose library books, so he stuck the call number on the spine and put it on the shelving truck without another thought.

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The two oddest mistakes I’ve run across. One paperback book I got as a kid that had no printing inside whatsoever; every page was blank. And a copy of one of Spider Robinson’s novels, one of the Lady Sally ones where two sections of the book were repeats of earlier pages of the book.

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I have that book. It’s called, What Men Know About Women.

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:stuck_out_tongue:

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Actually, the title is Everything Men Know About Women

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I don’t have a good book misprint story, but I have a pretty good CD misburning story.

I once received, as a gift, a “Best of” album of Frank Zappa songs on CD. This one, IIRC. Said CD consisted of some twenty or so “blank” tracks, each consisting of five to ten seconds of dead air, followed by one single track that appeared, as near as I could tell, to be the entirety of a Korean pop album.

The funny thing was, I only knew Frank Zappa by reputation. So for the longest time, I was never really sure if the CD was supposed to be like that or not.

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I have a book with the second half missing. What takes its place is the first half, upside-down and backwards, so you can read the first half of the book from either cover.

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I own a hardcover, leather edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide. (The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide)It contains all the books (that had been published up to that time) and the short story “Young Zaphod Plays it Safe”

It has a pretty major typo on the spine - It refers to the first two books as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and* The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy.*

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My favorite is a Keith Laumer book–that had a Richard Powers cover, Laumer’s name and the title of the book on the front, spine and the back cover had a blurb for the Laumer book…and the inside was a Zane Grey style western.

They put the wrong book cover on a zillion books. Seriously–next time you’re at a used bookstore, look for an early '70s, late '60s edition of Keith Laumer’s Night of Delusions–about 50% of 'em have the wrong insides (they fixed it by putting a new cover on the right contents, but as far as I can tell, they didn’t bother to recall the bad ones, based on the number I’ve seen out in the wild.)

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Not exactly a mistake but I always thought that whoever approved the cover for the last reprint of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series couldn’t have possibly read the book. It’s a picture of a space ship flying through space. The copy on amazon shows a space station. Neither one of these things have anything at all to do with the stories, which are basically fantasies.

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When I read Stephen King’s The Stand, I used a copy I checked out of the school library. It was a paperback, and for some reason about 80 pages were missing. They hadn’t been torn out, that would have been obvious; they were just never in the book. I was reading along, and suddenly page number 201 followed page 126, or something like that. I didn’t have easy access to another copy, so I just rolled with it, sort of stitching together the backstory for suddenly-appearing characters whose introductions I’d missed.

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lawoot, I own that book as well. Although I’ll never part with it, I’ve often wondered how it would sell on ebay.

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I have a couple of books with misplaced passages. In one case it’s a duplicated section of the same book. In the other it’s a section from a different book.

I also have a couple of misplaced DVD’s. One is two discs from Simon Schama’s History of Britain - the disc labeled volume three actually contains volume four and vice versa. Strange but no big deal as I end up having all four volumes. More annoying is the copy of I Was a Male War Bride I bought. When I put it in my DVD player, I found it was actually a disc from the third season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But the OP beats any of these. I’ve never seen a book get released with missing ink.

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The dust cover was not discarded. What I described was the dust cover. That’s what makes it so odd. The visible part lacks the author or title name.

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Does the actual HC have ink, or is it only embossed?

If the HC is legible and printed/embossed normally, the library may have thought that the weird DJ was a legit artistic move on the publisher’s side. Doubtful, but there’s a chance.

On the other hand (and far more likely) is that the book may have been pre-cataloged by a jobber, and the librarians in Tech Services usually only doublecheck a percentage of the books as quality control. This one wasn’t one of that percentage. That’s much more likely. Jobbers are notorious for not catching print/publishing errors. The people doing the pre-cats are usually in minimum-wage and high-turnover jobs, so it’s not really that shocking.

My final likely option; if this was the ONLY HC edition which was released, then the library may well know that the cover is misprinted, but the fact that HCs wear so much better than PBs in library settings makes it worth it to them to keep the HC even with the cover misprint.

(I am currently a library manager, and have worked in Tech Services.)

eta -

HC - hardcover
PB - paperback
DJ - just jacket
jobber - company with connections with lots of different publishing houses which contracts out to libraries and institutions to provide materials based on said library’s profiles and specific requests. Often the jobber will only provide the materials, sometimes they will (for an extra fee) provide the needed cataloging data for the materials as well.

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That is a pretty odd printing error.

Good reading selection, though. I have Hayden’s book on my shelf here somewhere, and i think it’s a nice piece of work.