Publishing on the Cheap

Casting about for a copy of Unbought Spirit to give a friend, I found that a press I hadn't heard of had brought John Jay Chapman's Memories and Milestones back into print. I imagined something like a Dover Publications edition: a bit boxy, covers with a coating that cracks, typography that looks dated. I gave the press too much credit.

 The publishers had used optical character recognition software. There are a number of maddening traces this has left:

• footnotes embedded in the running text
• captions for illustrations not included
• at the foot of each chapter the heading for the next one, like the catchword in older books, but immediately beneath the last paragraph
• the occasional odd character error
• occasional bad line breaking

The character errors can be entertaining, as when in chapter that mentions the unfortunate influence of business on education, one reads of the "Board o$ Trustees", or when a personal name almost appears in "Cory bantic". The failures in the line breaks set me to wonder about the algorithms used: in a couple of cases one or the other enclosing quotation mark is on a different line, leading me to suspect that somebody didn't think through a regular expression. In other places, a series of short lines, as if verses, appears inexplicably--maybe an illustration went there?

Had the publishers simply found an old copy, photographed the plates and created image files to print from, they'd have produced a much better volume. There would have been the occasional smudge, but "Pa-gliacci" and his friends would not have intruded. But a high-quality image file can be pretty fat compared to plain text--were they economizing on storage?