I do wish that some publishers would do a better job on copyediting. I’m happy to say that those who publish my friend Lyn’s books do, but here and there over the years I’ve spotted some very mixed outcomes in books by favourite authors. I always enjoyed Corgi’s J.T.Edson westerns, but wondered over the years if they even had a copyeditor. The books contained such gems as ‘Dwan found him by a small stream. Nope, he hasn’t been found by a sinister Oriental, but by a typo and the break of day. The J.D. Robb books published by Piatkus were also typo-ridden, but I think one of the best is one I found while reading a 1990 edition of the Fontana paperback, Agatha Christie’s Poirot. In the tale, The Kidnapped Prime Minister, I found this sentence… nothing is easier to personate than a pubic character. I immediately had a mental picture of, um, no, I won’t go there, suffice it to say that it was an odd image. And really, isn’t that one of the most obvious typos there is, and shouldn’t they be aware of it? But the edition I was reading was a first edition and maybe they corrected it later. But it provided me with a chuckle for the day, and I suppose you can’t ask for more than that really.
