New Book by Charles Simic

I just finished reading the newest book by the poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic, entitled That Little Something, and it's left me a little sad. Not because of the book, or the poetry therein, which are, characteristically, excellent, but by the production values of the book itself. Several of the pages, including several in the front, were poorly printed, at least one of the poems near the back (I don't usually look too closely at that kind of thing) has a typographical error, several pages weren't completely cut apart. And the worst, and most inexcusable, problem is in the front list of the poet's previous books, where one title is printed Charon's Cosmetology, which should obviously be Charon's Cosmology (I even checked my copy because reading it the other way was so shocking)!

Over the last 20 years or so, coincident with the rise of computerized typesetting and the electronic creation and dissemination of text, I have noticed a marked drop in the quality of published text. I believe it's a result of computerized spell checking-- which does not yield publication quality text-- and a general decline in the standards of the reading public. When so much text is generated so quickly on computer screens for the internet, there's a feeling that anything we read can be sloppy because it's not permanent-- it's ephemeral, and not worth the trouble of all that old-fashioned proof reading. The New Yorker managed to acquire a stuffy, strait-laced reputation for being so polished with copy editing and proof reading. At the other extreme were computer books in the early 90's that had scores of typographical errors, even in printed computer code, which were bad enough to make the example programs not work. The reader (this was before the internet, or at least before it was ubiquitous) was left to figure it out for themselves. Computer books soon thereafter started to come bound with the source code on diskettes-- where they would at least not be subject to errors in transcription-- and then on CD's (bigger and cheaper and less likely to break), and nowadays have all of their sample code posted on the internet where it can be changed by the publisher or the author on the fly if anything is found to be incorrect.

Which brings us back to the new Charlie Simic book. It's not a computer book, it's the newest book (I bought it in hardcover, for $23.00 plus tax) of poetry, from one of America's premier poets, and published by one of the most reputable literary publishers out there-- Harcourt. Harcourt has done Mr. Simic, and the poetry loving public (a small universe if there ever was one) a disservice. The sloppy print job and imperfect binding would have been bad enough, and the typos-- well, it happens-- but by blatantly misspelling the title of one of the author's previous publications they really blew it. I feel like the grand old man got bilked by the fast talking upstart management at the publisher, and then they sold the book to me, knowing nothing would happen. Frankly, I feel like we're now characters in a Simic poem. And I'm disappointed.