Thursday, July 26, 2007

Some Harry Potter Books Are Missing Pages

Egads.

The Associated Press reports that Scholastic said that of the twelve million books printed, several hundred have pages missing.


And this is to be expected I guess. It is one of, if not the, largest initial print run in history.

I did buy an anthology many years ago of short horror fiction and while I was reading it I noticed that it had a chunk of pages in the middle duplicated. I went back to the store and they happily exchanged it but it was a weird experience. People come to trust books in many ways and to see one flawed like that was just unsettling in some way to me.

It's a bit frightening to wonder if any of the as of yet unread books lining my walls are defective...

THE BIG BOX OF OLD PAPERBACKS BOOK CLUB

Last summer, while shopping at a Half Price Books And Records location in Chicago, I [Keith Phipps] came across something I didn’t know I needed until I saw it. After perusing the recent arrivals, I made my way to the less heavily trafficked back of the store where, next to stacks of back issues of Good Housekeeping I found a big, narrow box wrapped in plastic. It contained over 75 old paperbacks published between the ‘60s and ‘80s, all of it genre fiction, most of it science fiction. I had to have it, and at the price of $35, I somehow couldn’t afford not to buy it.

I also gave myself the project of reading the entire box. And after neglecting that project for a while, I decided to revive it here


He's started on his 5th book and I think it's a lot of fun to keep up with his reading of the entire box.

(I've always though books with commercials/advertisements in them were just hilarious.)