Reproductions

Today I finished The Martian Tales Trilogy. It was an omnibus containing the first three books of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series. While they lack the character development of something from Dickens or Dumas, they were fantastic adventure stories. I'm kind of surprised that no one has tried to translate them to the big screen.

Unfortunately though, this edition was very poorly edited. I'm thinking it was somehow produced through OCR, spellchecked, but never proofread. All the words appear to be spelled correctly, or most of them, but there are many places were the wrong word is in a sentence, despite being spelled correctly. For the most part I've been able to figure out what the word should be, but I wonder how many readers would be able to do that.

This has caused me to put some serious thought into whether I want to keep this book, or replace it with another book, or multiple books. Indeed, the Easton Press recently published a beautiful set that contains the first five books of the series, but Maryanne would probably kill me for spending that much money on books.

Next on the list is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This particular edition is from Atheneum, and reproduces the classic 1911 Scribner's edition which featured illustrations from the great N. C. Wyeth.

I've read the book before, in junior high, wherein I got my first taste of adaptations. I was lucky enough to have a paperback copy at home at the time, for the copies that were handed out in class, and which I declined, were adaptations. Being able to compare the two when the text was read aloud in class, I was frustrated by the fact that the original text had been "dumbed down." Indeed, it could have been this experience that has led me to seek original texts and faithful translations whenever possible. And it was this experience that probably so stifled my future enjoyment of English class for a long, long time.