"David Garnett - Off The Track" - читать интересную книгу автора (Garnett David)

When my first novel Mirror in the Sky was published, I gazed at it in
admiration: it was just wonderful. I'm talking about the physical
appearance of the book, of course: never in the whole history of
publishing had there been such a handsome paperback. I was totally
thrilled, absolutely delighted. The book looked so good, felt just right,
it was a magnificent object.
I flicked through the pages, all those words, hundreds and hundreds to
each page, thousands and thousands throughout the novel. And all of them
my words!
There was no need to read them all, of course, because I knew the story
they told. Why read a book when you know what happens?
After a while, I decided to take a look at the fictional content from an
objective position. When you read a novel, you start with the first
chapter. So I started reading the first chapter of Mirror in the Sky.
As a science fiction novel, it wasn't too unusual that the opening chapter
was set on board a spaceship. But I have to admit to feeling a bit
disappointed when after a few pages the word "ship" was printed as "shop".


Every author has found typographical errors in their work. Every reader
has found glitches in books and stories. Most of these are obvious, but
others are harder to detect and can pass unnoticed during a fast reading.
Writers have even been known to make mistakes of their own, and when these
remain uncorrected and are immortalised in print, the writer has no one
else to blame except for himself/herself н- apart from the editor who
should have noticed, the copy editor who should have noticed, and the
proof reader who should have noticed. (The job descriptions "copy editor"
and "proof reader" are becoming as rare as blacksmith and wheelwright.)
There is another category of mistake: the "improvements" and "corrections"
made by editors which are in fact worse or incorrect н- but for which the
author is blamed, because whose name appears on the text?

A story or novel is never completely finished. An author can keep on
revising almost forever, taking a word out one day, putting it back the
next, changing it the next, then changing the change...all in the endless
quest for perfection.
Even when it has been published, that doesn't mean the story is over. The
words are not sacred text, carved into tablets of stone. When a story is
printed, there will inevitably be errors of some kind. A reprint offers
the chance to correct those errors н- and also to give the story another
polish.
But, of course, another reprint also means the chance of introducing
different mistakes...

For example: I once had a story published in Interzone called "The Only
One" and when it was to be reprinted in Interzone н- The Third Anthology,
I corrected the errors in the text (very few and very minor, such as the
word "red" which should have been "end") and also took the opportunity to
run the text through my word processor again.
When the anthology was published, my contribution contained a variety of