14 January 2015

'Happy to Take the Money'

In my previous post, Books on the Carlsen - Anand Matches, I mentioned the low ratings given by customer reviews for the Keene / Karlovich books. One comment on the book about the 2014 match baffled me:-
I am returning my two books. I bought one, and Amazon sent another when I said the first one was defective. Well, the second one was messed up, too. All of the chess diagrams in the second half of the text are complete nonsense, e.g. a diagram may have a black knight sitting on each light square: 24 black knights at once.

I couldn't imagine how that looked on the printed page. By coincidence, a few days later in 9046. Carlsen v Anand match book, Chesshistory.com reproduced a pair of pages from the same book. It boggles the mind that such a blatant series of errors could slip through the proofreading process. Then it struck me -- the book has never been proofread!

The Amazon 'Look Inside' feature (a real godsend for books like this one) offers many more examples of errors. See, for example, the following photo and caption from page 7.

'One it entitled to wonder...'

'Us chess players do not ask questions. [Us] are just happy to take the money...'. That pretty much sums up the philosophy behind this book.

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