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Cover misprints
21 March 2006
Another thought on collected things: I have added - hurrah! - to my small but potent collection of books-with-misprints-on-their-covers. I love these, simply because I do not understand, I cannot conceive of the mind-set of someone who would proofread so very casually that the book's jacket could carry a mistake. I don't just mean a typo in the blurb on the back. I have a copy of The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (count the ds, there's one too many); I have a copy of The Sweeny (count the es, there’s one too few). And now, in the same vein, I have a copy of Michaelmas by Algis Budry (count the ss, there’s one too few [no, no, not in the title - Algis Budrys is his name, or was, before the book club got ahold of him] - but is this a - rare - case for marking a plural with an apostrophe, should I have said s's, for the sake of clarity?).
Meanwhile, I think the Not-So-Idiot Boy has been collecting dinners, in my absence. Granted that he starved himself for a few days when he was with me, but even so, I swear he's put on weight this last week. Which is all very welcome, because he could use it; but if it's true it is unnervingly swift, and I'm so not used to regulating what a cat eats, suddenly I'm scared that I'll look down one day and find he's so fat that the jump onto my lap is defeating him...
At the moment, I have to say, he is grace and power in perfect proportion. And perhaps he is still gracile really, perhaps he's only fluffed his fur out a bit on account of the extreme cold? Because he wasn't here these days I've been away, I turned the central heating right down low, and twenty-four hours of pumping heat still hasn't warmed the bones of the house at all, only its breath. We huddle by its exhaling mouths, my boy and I, and shiver when we have to move away. It really is most unseasonably cold; I understand this is due to global warming. Bah, humbug...
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.