scrambled books ...

I'm looking at a hardcover book that I recently picked out. The cover art is rather beautiful - a black and white background of trees and snow with a small red bird in the foreground (that somehow looks like part cardinal, part finch, and part hummingbird). The title, and a review quote on the back, are printed in black on what looks like a brass plate with elegant decorative etching. Simple, and appealing book design.

The contents however include much cruel material that seems intended to deliberately repel rather than appeal to the reader. There are lengthy redundancies, and places where the characters' names are jumbled. These appear to be errors or intentional offenses, not some sort of artistic device. I read about an eighth of it, got suspicious, and glanced through the rest only to find that it gets more persistently cruel the deeper you go.

I'd just let it go, except I've come to realize across the last fifteen years or so that a number of recommended books are broken reads, with the same issues as this one has. A formulaic wrecking of what was perhaps once an engaging work.

Some of my favorite authors came out with new books that were not readable, in the same way that this one is not. At first I thought well, maybe the writer lost his or her trusted editor. But then, I bought or borrowed books that I've read and reread in the past. Some of the new printings no longer contain the same material - and they have problems like those listed above that were not there in the past. A messed up children's classic, 'Anne of Green Gables', doctored books by John Irving and by Jean Auel, Bill Cosby and by Anne Tyler. I've seen altered Bibles, art books and reference books with greatly misleading material and phony illustrations. It is a grief, the undermining of our treasury of cultural and scientific knowledge. Others are aware of this situation, not just in literature, but in sciences, the arts, music and film. I don't know how the problems are being addressed. It might be helpful just to label damaged material as 'edited without permission of the author or publisher' - a kind of 'beware' for the readers and viewers, as a starting point. Over time, perhaps we shall gradually recover what has been lost.