That’s pretty common for science fiction novels. A lot of publishers automatically put a spaceship on the cover of anything SF, regardless of the book’s contents.
I have an older edition of Enzinger and Weiss’ “Soft Tissue Tumors” with a couple of sections (about 40 pages worth) missing.
Never knew it was valuable. If any Dopers want it as an investment, I’ll take $10 for it.
I have an old copy of LeCarré’s A Murder Of Quality, one of those 50 cent Signet ones with the red coloring on the edge of the pages, that has the same chapter reprinted three times in a row.
It took me about halfway through the third one to realize what had happened.
I’ve been in meetings all day - not sure what to add about what you found Exapno. Maybe it was an Advanced Reading Copy that found it’s way into circulation??
Lots of weird publishing mishaps - too many to list. With Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - first it was printed on a subscription basis, so it didn’t have editions, per se - just printed based on demand. But there are countless variants that have been estimated to have a chronological order so earlier volumes can be sorted out. The most notorious was caught before the text was finalized for production - on one of the drawings, an old man (who I think has a beard, wearing a shirt and trousers and yelling at Huck or something) has a big penis emerging from his pants - a joke on the part of the printer. It was caught prior to printing, but some extant versions exist…
I tried to do a search, but with all of the news about the N-word-scrubbed edition just coming out, I couldn’t find an example of this drawing while in my office here at work…
ETA - hereis the drawing, but the cleaned up version…the fact that the copy for sale that the picture is linked from is a “cancel page” means it was cut out and replaced after being bound - I suspect it was because it has the original drawing that needed to be swapped out…
Is it possible the book originally had a jacket cover that is now missing? I’ve had a few hardcover books that have the jacket in full multi-color with titles and text but the actual book is pretty baren with maybe a single tone light image of the cover.
Nevermind- Didn’t see post 18.
No, it’s clearly the standard hardcover with a dj that got added despite not going through the black ink printing stage.
Lasciel, I’m not terribly surprised that the library decided to keep the copy. It would have been a pain to send it back for a replacement. It’s that anybody could not have noticed the mistake at the printer’s end that baffles me. The cover looks wrong at a casual glance. It’s not an easily missed mistake. The spine is totally blank! How do you let that get by? (The boards are red cloth with The Grand Domestic Revolution Hayden in white on the spine along with a press logo.)
The fact that a search on the name and even the ISBN pulled up exactly one example of the proper cover makes me wonder how many were ever shipped. That one example is listed as a second printing. But there are lots of first edition hardbacks for sale, and every one of them uses the paperback cover as an image when one is given and none mention anything about a flawed dj. Hmm, I suppose it’s possible that the first printing used the same cover as the trade paperback and this is a flawed example of a smaller second printing. But there is no indication anywhere that this is a second printing.
There’s got to be a story behind this, but it’s so old that I’m sure all the guilty are long gone.
Apparently there was a run of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that was popular with Navy personnel but ended after the squid scene, with the rest of the pages blank.
My first copy of The Etched City had the first half replaced with the proceedings from a conference on Virginia Woolf. I wasn’t quite sure until I got another copy that it wasn’t intentional - I mean, the book was just recommended to me as “you know, that New Weird stuff”.