Classifying the texts used in the U.S. mass market paperbacks (Ballantine/Del Rey)

Thank you for sharing that, Ugo. It's very interesting! I have found some things recently that you may find of interest.

The difference between your A3gα-A and A3gα-B is solely page 21 being reset. All the other pages between the two typesettings are identical, including some typesetting peculiarities, a few of which include: p. 23, 3rd line from bottom, the last character, w, has no apertures between serifs; p. 82, 6th line from bottom, the final ‘r,’ in the line appears to be bold; p.140 line 13: the s in the word ‘slip’ sits slightly below the line; p. 164 line 6 from bottom: ‘craft’ obtrudes into left margin; p. 232 line 24: first word (‘is’) in both 23 and 57: the i lacks its dot; p. 284: the lower half of the page shows an increasing left margin line by line, with a corresponding decrease in the right margin: a bent paragraph. (I found the last one puzzling, so spent some diverting hours looking into early 1970s printing technology; I remain puzzled.)

04.017 'The crack closed....', p. 68 in both A3gα and A3gβ: The sentence 'They seized Bilbo and the dwarves and hurried them along.' drops out in the 1966 59th (June 1976), the A3gβ resetting. It remains absent from the text through A3cc until your 5α-2001 (-A, at least; I will have to pick up a -B).

I considered collating the line break differences between the A3gα and A3gβ, but it seems a bit much, as A3gβ is certainly a full resetting of the text. The typeface is the same as A3gα, but slightly larger, so that the textblock on a filled page takes up a full 1 cm more of the page. In addition, spacing differs amongst words on even when line breaks and page breaks are not affected.

I'll have more to share in the near future.

oxonianus wrote:

The difference between your A3gα-A and A3gα-B is solely page 21 being reset. All the other pages between the two typesettings are identical,

Yes I agree, that's why I considered them variants of the same text (as they have -A and -B and not greek letters) and not two texts. I might rephrase this point to better highlight this fact (I wish I could express myself in English as fluently as I read it.)

including some typesetting peculiarities, a few of which include: p. 23, 3rd line from bottom, the last character, w, has no apertures between serifs; p. 82, 6th line from bottom, the final ‘r,’ in the line appears to be bold; p.140 line 13: the s in the word ‘slip’ sits slightly below the line; p. 164 line 6 from bottom: ‘craft’ obtrudes into left margin; p. 232 line 24: first word (‘is’) in both 23 and 57: the i lacks its dot; p. 284: the lower half of the page shows an increasing left margin line by line, with a corresponding decrease in the right margin: a bent paragraph. (I found the last one puzzling, so spent some diverting hours looking into early 1970s printing technology; I remain puzzled.)

I might add those if it's ok for you.

04.017 'The crack closed....', p. 68 in both A3gα and A3gβ: The sentence 'They seized Bilbo and the dwarves and hurried them along.' drops out in the 1966 59th (June 1976), the A3gβ resetting. It remains absent from the text through A3cc

Yes, I already uploaded that particular locus here. I haven't put all of them in the table, they are (or will be, I have more to add) listed here.

until your 5α-2001 (-A, at least; I will have to pick up a -B).

Because with the 2001 paperbacks Del Rey abandoned the series of texts deriving from A3f (A3f>A3gα>A3gβ>A3cc) and "imported" the 1995 5th edition (5α). 2001 it's an interruption: the "original" line ends with A3cc and all errors, quirks, lack of 3rd edition revisions, etc. of that line ends with A3cc. They are not correction in 5α-2001, simply it's another text with a different/separate textual history.

If it's not clear enough what I mean in the article, I'll elaborate.

I considered collating the line break differences between the A3gα and A3gβ, but it seems a bit much, as A3gβ is certainly a full resetting of the text. The typeface is the same as A3gα, but slightly larger, so that the textblock on a filled page takes up a full 1 cm more of the page. In addition, spacing differs amongst words on even when line breaks and page breaks are not affected.

I'll have more to share in the near future.

I look forward to it!

Thank you for your work, Ugo. You are certainly welcome to use anything I have shared.

Please don't apologize for your English; you write it better than some native speakers. Your classification system is quite effective. I think perhaps mentioning on the page that just the single page differs between A3gα-A and A3g-B would help clarify the difference for users. It's also an interesting thing to mention in order to help people understand that these changes occurred so rarely because of the technology. It would have been a great deal of work to correct all the errors in the volume, and attempting to do so would create new ones, as is seen with A3gβ. I'm waiting to hear back from someone with the answer, but it seems that Ballantine in the 1970s and 1980s sent their work to a printing firm which used a Linotype machine for composition, and long-lasting flexible plastic plates for printing, each of which contained a number of pages. Changes would require those large plates to be re-cast, which involved further expense and impact the publishing schedule, both of which Ballantine sought to avoid.

I should clarify that those odd typographic similarities between A3gα-A and A3gα-B that I mentioned are not an exhaustive list. Those are simply the ones that I happened to notice; undoubtedly there are others.

And yes, I noticed, too, the 'extinction' of the Ballantine text with the 5α-2001. The did something similar with the 2000 editions of their Lord of the Rings volumes, importing the 1994 HarperCollins text; they need to update those again, as the 1994 is possibly the worst possible choice, and the current text is much-corrected.

I will send you more soon! Keep up the good work!