Finds

Possibly as in should find a way to pull myself together and work through the long list of things I have to do over the next few days, though actually as in Faber Finds and charity shop finds. Now before I go any further I want to make it clear that I have a huge amount of respect for Faber and Faber as a publisher, and everyone of their books that I owned to date is a thing of beauty both inside and out.

The exception now it’s come is a Faber Finds title – Robert Aickman’s ‘The Unsettled Dust’ that I got in Oxfam. I did wonder what it was doing there because these aren’t really cheap paperbacks (I’ve checked and this one would have been £13), and because they’re almost exclusively print on demand. Really the sort of thing you buy because you want it and not on a whim, so not the sort of thing that goes to a charity shop. I felt lucky, not least because I’ve been curious about print on demand for a while but haven’t felt able to afford a proper exploration. (I have a few Virago’s which are print on demand, but a brief search has revealed very little about their policy on this, and I’m not aware of being able to order up any old title that appeals. Which is a shame.)

‘The Unsettled Dust’ is a collection of short stories about the supernatural, and I wholeheartedly agree that it deserves both survival and revival. I was hooked in from the very beginning of the title story; narrated in a querulous middle aged voice it chronicles the strange atmosphere of a national trust type property. It really is quite unsettling, but in a very quiet way, nothing shocking, nothing terribly dramatic happens – but at the end of every one the world that’s known and safe seems a little bit more fragile.

The problem is that something’s gone very wrong with the resetting of the text, I have a fairly liberal view regarding grammar and spelling and will overlook quite a lot of errors even when I notice them, but take this as an example “But, as it to connrm me man s point mat runner communication” which I eventually deciphered as “But as if to confirm the man’s point that further communication”. This is a particularly atrocious excerpt but in the same story a character’s name changes from Agnes to Agnew (at about the same time that it becomes clear that the child in question is male), and although sometimes there were pages without noticeable errors the overall effect makes it hard to follow the plot or appreciate the quality of the writing.

The experience has made me wary of print on demand, and particularly wary of Faber. I can’t tell if this is typical, but I now have no intention of ordering any of the (few) £15+ titles on my wish list until I’ve heard good reports from others – I really can’t afford that kind of disappointment. It’s a shame and as I’ve been re reading about Faber Finds I’m feeling increasingly torn, not least because I’m comparing directly with the Bloomsbury group reprints (amazon parcel turned up yesterday and I’m off work for the week. Very happy.)

I understand that they are not at all the same thing, the Bloomsbury group books are not print on demand, but they are a nicely put together series of books which are most definitely being revived, publicised, and generally celebrated. Physically they’re a real pleasure to read with a particularly nice type (I love the Q’s). Faber Finds are printed specifically for customer orders and the list of potentially available titles is huge – which is exciting. Realistically a list this long and diverse couldn’t exist without print on demand, and again I can’t stress enough how exciting I find this list, which is perhaps why this particular experience has been so disappointing.