The New York Times crossword puzzle for Sunday, March 29, included the clue "Odd-numbered page" for the word "recto". This came to mind on Saturday when I was re-reading Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects by Peter Geach. It is not that Geach touches on the terms of publishing and printing, rather that I became aware that the odd-numbered page I was reading was on the verso of the physical leaf. And so it runs from page 1 (verso) through page 136 (recto).
This did not impede my reading, merely annoyed me as another example of the carelessness of production at Legate Street Press, which I have complained of before. What did slow me a little was off-by-one errors in references to sections. At times a reference to §x will turn out to be a reference to §x + 1. So in §18, there is a reference to an a treatment in §18, which turns out to mean §19. Now these are are not the sort of errors that can be introduced by optical-character recognition (OCR), which the press pretty clearly used. Was the volume copied by some chance an uncorrected proof?
Carelessness like this is why I qualify my enthusiasm for works moving quickly into the public domain. I don't just want the text of a book, I want the corrected text, meaning among other things text with the references to section numbers squared away. I want some context, for example the date of publication. I would like assurance that somebody, not necessarily a philosopher, but a competent editor, has looked at the page proofs before the book went to press. And that assurance is destroyed by a contradiction of the long-standing practice that odd numbered pages appear on the verso, and by erroneous section references.
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