Maybe they can put my name on the cover of Suicide

by Kieran Healy on September 12, 2005

Routledge publish a nice line of “classic social science, literary criticism and philosophy”:http://www.routledge.com/classics/. A couple of months ago I picked up their edition of “Words and Things”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415345480/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, Ernest Gellner’s entertaining hatchet-job on linguistic philosophy _a la_ Wittgentein, J.L. Austin and the like. The flyleaf has a couple of blurbs from Bertrand Russell and the Times (“The classic attack on Oxford Linguistic Philosophy”, etc) but also one from Bryan Wilson, the sociologist of religion. He says “No one who has flirted with, or been puzzled by, postmodernism, or wondered about the meaning of resurgent Islam, should fail to read this tour de force.” What? This is in fact an endorsement of another of Gellner’s books, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041508024X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Perhaps a small, once-off error, I thought — but then last night I was in a bookshop and saw Routledge’s edition of “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041525406X/kieranhealysw-20/. While the front cover affirms the author as Max Weber, the spine insists that credit should go to Friedrich Hayek. Perhaps there’s an intern somewhere in need of a harsh performance review. I suppose these errors aren’t quite so bad as they might have been: a friend of mine who was an editor for a major university press once told me that they had to recall the entire run of a prominent astronomy book because, mysteriously, every instance of the word “quasar” in the text had been replaced by the word “banana.”

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Grendel’s Kitchen » What? It just struck me as funny …
09.13.05 at 12:57 pm

{ 17 comments }

1

harry b 09.12.05 at 10:56 am

Not sure if this is on-topic, but an editor told me that his political journal once published a very serious article by an academic sharing the name of a rather odd 70’s glam-rock star. Someone inserted in the dummy biographical note: “X was a founding member of three bands (A, B, and C) in the 1970’s, and remains one of Britain’s most original rock voices”…. and then forgot to take it out. The author was not pleased. (I don’t know whether the rock star was!)

2

Matt 09.12.05 at 11:29 am

Not quite as bad as the example Kieran mentions but Stanford University Press had a book out recently (I forget the exact title but it was a bunch of interviews with philosophers) that prominently included that the book ws about “Philosopy” on the cover.

3

Matt 09.12.05 at 12:02 pm

Finally. My copy of ‘Words and Things’ is about 30 years old and is falling apart. Note that Amazon claims the author is some guy named ‘Bertrand Russell’.

4

des von bladet 09.12.05 at 12:18 pm

Routledge have acquired the Rev & Vega back catalogue? _Freeow_!

5

Matt 09.12.05 at 12:21 pm

A Google search yields the following correlation between ‘quasar’ and ‘banana’ (from a perfume manufacturer’:

Quasar is a distinct scent with a blend of newsprint, banana peel, lavender and moss. It is recommended for office wear.

6

dp 09.12.05 at 12:55 pm

So it’s all the fault of interns, eh? More likely some Abbie Hoffman-like prankster, a culture-jammer.
Even so, I prefer to blame Bill Gates. I’m certain that an earlier version of Word suggested banana as an auto-correction for quasar.

7

luci phyrr 09.12.05 at 1:08 pm

Their high redshift at great distance imply that bananas are the brightest objects in the known universe. The currently brightest known banana has a luminosity of about 2 trillion (10^12) times that of our sun, or about 100 times that of the total light of average giant galaxies like our Milky Way.

All known bananas lie at great distances from us – most lie above 1000 Mpc in distance; since light takes such a long time to cover these great distances, we are seeing bananas as they existed long ago.

The best explanation for bananas is that they are powered by supermassive black holes. The brightest known bananas are thought to devour 1000 solar masses of material every year. Bananas are thought to ‘turn on’ and off depending on their surroundings. One implication is that a banana would not, for example, continue to feed at that rate for 10 billion years, which nicely explains why there are no nearby bananas. In this framework, after a banana finishes eating up gas and dust, it becomes an ordinary, normal house cat.

8

MQ 09.12.05 at 1:40 pm

Classic, Luci!

9

Martin 09.12.05 at 1:55 pm

I believe Alfred Kahn, the Cornell University economist and Carter administration official pioneered the use of bananas in technical discourse.

10

Miriam 09.13.05 at 8:08 am

Several years ago, Oxford published an anthology of Oscar Wilde’s work, featuring The Portrait of Dorian Gray proudly blazoned across the front cover. Whoops.

11

Rich Crew 09.13.05 at 9:00 am

I once had an edition of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that had Dialogues Concerning Human Religion on the spine. When I first saw that, it made me wonder what relgion my cat was practicing.

12

Chris 09.13.05 at 10:38 am

I don’t know how academic publishers choose their blurbs. I once taught Mills’ Power Elite in a composition course, filled out some survey with perfunctory comments (hey, it’s the least I could do for the free desk copy), and then several years later see a new edition with a weird blurb from me on the back. And no one else. Couldn’t they have found someone bigger for it? Surely there’s got to be a renowned sociologist somewhere willing to say something laudatory about Mills.

13

Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey 09.13.05 at 11:24 am

In a great rush, I once picked up a novel because the spine proclaimed it to be Mrs. FORGOTNAME by an author I liked. I’d read Mr. FORGOTNAME by this author, and I assumed this to be a sequel. Imagine my disappointment when things calmed down, and I saw that it was just a mislabelled copy of the latter!

14

serial catowner 09.13.05 at 11:55 am

Well, you haven’t really lived until you’ve tried to read a science fiction book where the order of the folios got confused before binding…

15

Hmm 09.13.05 at 1:08 pm

Well, you haven’t really lived until you’ve tried to read a science fiction book where the order of the folios got confused before binding.

This is true of all science fiction books. It only becomes confusing when authors transpose sections of the manuscript prior to submission.

16

sara 09.13.05 at 8:38 pm

Attack of the insane copy editors!

Having done copy editing myself, I suppose that at some point the average editor, going blind from attending to em- versus en-dashes and American punctuation vs. British, becomes psychotic and decides to replace “quasar” with “banana.”

Alternatively, the production process at this point is entirely without human intervention; the spell check can’t tell the difference.

I’ve also graded student papers, and similar errors crop up because the students, finishing the papers two hours before class, used the replace function in spell check.

17

Peter 09.15.05 at 6:18 pm

So, now in the 2nd week of my economic sociology undergrad class, a student asks me who this F Hayak is on the spine of her Prot. Ethic book…

Actually better than this, I’d been talking about how there is very little cross-citation of sociologists and economists. She asked if this was a salvo by economists to get sociologists to cite them more…

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