Dec 15
Stationed at Ft. Washington, Wayne methodically built and trained his forces over two years. When they took the field, they and the absurdity of people who believed skin color to be a character trait.
If you read that last sentence more than once, don’t worry. There is nothing wrong with your skills in reading comprehension. For my part I read the sentence three times over before recognizing the problem. You see, as I read the excerpt from the book Character is Destiny, the sentence was split across the book’s binding between two pages.
When they took to the field, they — page break– and the absurdity of people who believed skin color to be a character trait.
It took several moments of confusion before I noticed that the left-hand page was numbered 206 while the right-hand page was numbered 175. The start of the sentence was in a chapter describing the Indian warrior Tecumseh, the rest of the sentence was written in a chapter that chronicles an episode in the life of Nelson Mandela. The copy of the book which I have been reading for the past week turns out to be a misprint. At page 206 the page count jumps backward to page 175, reprinting more than 30 pages of material which I have already read. When the repeated pages reach the mysterious number 206 they dive forward to page 237 and continue on as though nothing has happened. I’ve never encountered anything like it, and I consider myself to be “well read”; far more than the average Steve America, at least those of us without a degree in literature. Being completely dumbfounded by the lump of paper in my hands, I stared at the pages for several minutes, scratching my head in curiosity as a monkey investigating the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What used to be a terrifically enjoyable book was now but a morbid oddity, a baby born seemingly normal but then unexpectedly revealed to be retarded. The book’s birth defect obscured all previously established opinion.
Were the book published by Gutenberg himself I would be humble in my objections. But I live in the world of tomorrow. The future is now! And that future, though perhaps not featuring the flying cars and time machines God promised us, certainly incorporates advanced technique in the use of moveable type. I would be amazed, nay, both shocked and awed, were it to be disproved that not only were computers used to write the book, but robots and machines were used in its physical assembly. I doubt that in the entire process, beyond the point where John McCain himself hit F7 to run the spell check, humans had any involvement in this book’s creation more important than reloading the ink cartridge on printing press #248. How then could such a thing happen? It would seem that I have in my possession the long sought evidence which demonstrates the fallibility of modern technology. I was tempted to quickly burn the proof before the government managed to track me down via my bookstore purchase slip (one of the pesky downsides to the Patriot Act). But while striking the first match I sadly realized that the book set me back more than twenty bucks, member discount included. No ideal, no matter how noble, is worth that much.
I ran a search on Google to see if there was a known problem with certain editions of this book. No? Well how about other books by the publisher? No again. I went to Barnes and Noble’s website, the womb from which the demon spawned, to look up what I am supposed to do in a case such as this. There is no mention of the problem whatsoever. The closest I came was to find the return policy on books damaged while being shipped. I sent B&N an email – one that hopefully makes its way through their various email filters – detailing my problem. Though I am a devout believer in all that is modern, mechanical, and electronic, I can only hope that my problem makes its way to an actual human being with the ability to resolve my moderately serious literary crisis. In the meantime I am placing the deformed book on a shelf of its own, lest it infect my other books with its witchcraft. Extreme? Perhaps. But I can’t take the risk of one day picking up my copy of Ender’s Game only to hear it cry out, “I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil!“