[quote author=Michael Ayton link=1147283572/90#94 date=1174915821]The daft "recuperating" is indeed maddening. 'Fraid Tony Kosten too has committed this honker in the past, but he's stopped now![/quote]
Well, as a Frenchman I can only sympathise with Tony & Glenn, since "recuperating" is widely used in French for "getting back" as well as "recovering", and especially in chess circles, "recuperating material" (lit. "recuperer du matos", meaning "getting back some of the material investment") is frequently heard as a desperate invokation to the Goddess of Compensation. So maybe they're just enjoying their Year(s) In Provence ?

Ah, well, I haven't read that one, so it wasn't that I had in mind. I've seen it in other English-authored chess books. Definitely shouldn't've slagged poor old MM for it then!

Saw this in the bookshop today, btw. Really weird layout. Didn't like it on a quick glance (the layout that is). No opinion about the material.

Justinhorton wrote on 03/22/07 at 09:27:00:


I had a look just now: it's in Starting out: slav and semi-slav (Everyman, 2005). Page 225: "the recuperation of the c-pawn".

In the ten to fifteen minutes that it took me to find it, I also noticed errors (of various kinds) on pages 37, 42, 58, 70, 82, 141 and 219-220.

The cat will quite likely be emerging from the bag in a forthcoming magazine review...

Not sure what you mean. I've only been here a year and my comprehension of the language still leaves a lot to be desired so I haven't actually bought any books (having no income may also be a contributory factor). Apart from one very cheap one which I bought from a bookstall at the July Benasque tournament in order to improve my chess-Spanish.

I have seen a number of Gambit books translated into Spanish via La Casa Del Ajedrez who are a publisher and shop in Madrid. I happened to see them in the warehouse of a book distributor I visited and I can't say that they were kept in a state which made me keen to buy them.

The blog is here. It's not specifically mine: I'm just one of a number of contributors.

Of course there are specific issues relating to chess books, as there are specific issues relating to any given field of publishing. Nor are poor editorial standards unique to chess books. Dear me no. I am seated in a children's bookshop in a small town in North-East Spain (we sell books in English and Spanish). We have, for instance:

1. several books on which the spines state the author as "Tony Maddox" when, as the cover makes clear, it is not ;
2. a book by a very well-known writer in which the very first sentence has been incorrectly produced by the publisher (it says "soy" - I am - rather than "sois" - you are).

So, for instance, if you look at Byron Jacobs' book on the Classical French and the guide at the end of one chapter numbers all the games completely wrongly - well, that happens in other fields as well. I have a compilation of writing from New Worlds magazine in which the contents page gives the wrong page numbers for all the stories. Then again, other fields of publishing have tight margins too.

There will always be errors in books - errors of typesetting, errors of fact. I understand this. Nevertheless it happens far too much with certain publishers and the fact that some do it rather better than others is evidence that it need not be as shoddy as it often is. I hold publishers, not writers, generally responsible as I'm aware that once you have written a book it is almost impossible to spot your own errors - your eyes are so used to what you have written that you cannot slow down when scanning the pages. (Writing the same word twice twice in a row would be a common error.) Of course you always spot it after publication and I bet John Cox can tell us about the serious variation-numbering error in his "d4 deviations" book!

For what it's worth, I wonder whether the normal degree of error in chess book production is connected to the general approach of the publisher. For instance - towards the end of last year, I submitted a proposal for a book to three British chess publishing houses, none of whom accepted it. However, one of them replied quickly, asked me if I would reshape the proposal for a particular market and when I said I didn't think I had the particular expertise to do so, rejected the proposal swiftly and politely. (That's as much as you can really ask for and I have no problem with them.) A second replied swiftly, saying they would get back to me soon - and never did. A third never bothered to acknowledge it at all.

Now I've had book proposals rejected, ignored and accepted before so none of this was new or surprising. However, the three different experiences happen to reflect, in my opinion, the three different standards of book production of the three publishers: the first generally does very well, the second is often a bit shoddy and the third are worse.

Glenn Flear? I have several of his books and on the whole I like them, but I don't think written English is his forte - any more than playing chess at grandmaster level is mine. But somebody really should be correcting basic errors.

Interesting discussion. Does this mean that 'pressurize' is evolving into a new word (I've also heard it used in non-chess contexts) which will become quite normal and acceptable, or is it just plain wrong and a campaign to boycott it should be implemented?
Michael: many thanks for your very helpful post. Certainly chess margins are pretty tight (a point I think Nunn discusses in the final volume of his best games collection), but I suspect that chess publishing is different to many other publishing fields, although it may have some things in common with certain scientific fields. By this I mean that it's normal for a publisher to seek an author to write on x topic, rather than for the author (as with much fiction) to write a manuscript and then seek a publisher. That sometimes happens, and such books can be very good, but it's fairly rare. Of course, however, such a situation is by no means unique to chess: it's quite common for an author and publisher to agree a topic before any book is written in academic fields and many others I suspect.
More like science is that a chess book is quite technical, and not only because it often arrives in ChessBase format. Editors often have to, on top of the usual things like rearranging sections to fit the format, check the analysis and recent games, and especially add in all the diagrams or at least correct the diagram balance.
Perhaps authors should be forced to hand in a finished version in an ideal state, but here we come across another problem: deadlines. Of course, any good publisher builds in some extra time for a book to be late, but in the chess world it can't be too long: a book which was on time might otherwise sit in a warehouse for six months and become theoretically a little dated. Putting dates back and postponing printing is often expensive and so some books may be a little rushed to meet the scheduled publication date. I can see that this is far from ideal, but the options here appear to be a choice of evils.
Justin is entirely right that the c3 Sicilian diagram error is unacceptable, but I do feel that Everyman nowadays try quite hard to produce good books. Looking at Andrew Greet's topical and excellent Lopez work (which I wasn't involved in producing), both his writing and layout haven't caused me any complaints. Gambit's production quality is usually quite good, although when I was rather young and niave writing 'Play 1 d4!', I was surprised by how little help Batsford gave: essentially the book was typeset, but not properly edited nor, to the best of my knowledge, proof-read at their end.
Editing fees seem to be quite fixed and no matter how diligent the editor, I fear this must make a difference. Say, a book from an English author arrives and the English is good, then the editor will generally check to improve small grammatical points. However, if the initial book is all in eastern-european english, then the editor will probably spend much of his time rewriting the English and may let a few plausible, if not quite ideal, phrases stand. Editors are also affected by time scales and books being late. AFAIK Everyman editors don't deliberately rush, but I'd far prefer to edit for a standard 8 or so hours a day over 10-14 days, than have to do things in more of a hurry.
Hope some of this may be of interest, but, yes, Justin, standards can always be improved. Any chance please of a link to your blog? I suspect that like your enjoyable DisInformator and Kingpin material, it will be very readable!

P.S.
Surely Glenn's a pretty reasonable author? Furthermore, I think he also discusses adverbs (or some such topic) in his latest NiC YB review column!