Badly Printed Books

Or reprinted really. Friend of mine just received a book where the italics and boldface characters where half-missing but the regular characters were legible. My presumably slightly older copy is fine.

What’s going on here? I presume it’s some kind of cheapo printing process. Maybe a cutrate OCR at the front end of the process and the some kind of mimeograph thing at the other.

I once bought a book online that had been reprinted in which the paper was clearly kind of cheap and everything was a bit too blurry. Soon after I managed to find a used earlier edition that was much thinner and much more legible in the cheap carts in front of The Strand where it had somehow escaped the clutches of Tom Verlaine.

Maybe should have put this on ILB but whatever

Bold/Italic issues could be several pre-press issues: older format of PDF export, or Post Script production. Could be the bold/italic weights/variants were not an actual font file, and just mechanically created (with forced slant and outlines)... seen it all!

I recently went to a bookstore and saw a reprint of Improvisation by Derek Bailey – done by Da Capo books. A horrible reprint! The worst paper ever, lots of blurry text, overprint, faded text.

To me, everything related to Hachette books seems very iffy.

Thanks. I may quote you on that