Maybe something related to the photolitography (or whatever the name) technique they use for this works.

Mine are not too bad but you can notice some vertical shrinkage to the fonts sometimes, or a little lack of parallelism of some of the lines.

I had hoped they had set the text for this edition but...HC...🤷

First of all, how did you notice that? It’s not something I’d noticed until now. But it’s not bothering me as the text is not blurred or unreadable. I wonder if it was the way that printer works, as in inkjet dots?

Maybe it's one of the shrinking benefits of my older eyes 🤣

Amon Rudh wrote:

Maybe it's one of the shrinking benefits of my older eyes 🤣

An optimistic approach! I like it)

Huan wrote:

First of all, how did you notice that? It’s not something I’d noticed until now. But it’s not bothering me as the text is not blurred or unreadable. I wonder if it was the way that printer works, as in inkjet dots?

Huan, that's a good question, indeed. I was reading the text and it felt like the text is pale or blurry, I just couldn't explain better, but it felt somewhat wrong to my eyes. So I looked closer and noticed these lines. I thought, ok, let's look at my other regular hardbacks of Silm and UT, but they were fine. After that I decided to check all 4 books in the box. I noticed that the BoLT p. 1 and p. 2 are not the same, their text looks ok - clear or saturated, I'd describe with these words. At this point I wanted to make sure my eyes are not lying to me about faulty letters, so I've taken several photos with my iPhone. Here is how I was sure there is really an issue. But if to be honest this edition mostly bothers me with a glued binding instead of a sewn one. I really intended to read these, but now I start noticing that glued binding reacts not so good to dozens of book open-close cycles and turning over the pages. That's why I've recently purchased HC HOME eBooks on their Glose reader. I think I will stay away from purchasing the other 3 boxes. Dust jackets are wonderful, but glued binding makes these books not the practical book copies, unfortunately. Maybe one day HC would issue a higher quality edition of 12 volumes of HOME.

I was initially concerned about the glued binding too but as someone above stated, I suspect they will be more robust than expected. I too have many books with glued bindings over 40 years old. Who knows but I'll be buying the others for sure.

Aren’t the original hardcovers glued??

Certainly my Return of the Shadow second edition was stitched. The POD were all glued.

Scarlet_Sorcerer wrote:

Aren’t the original hardcovers glued??

The UK 1st editions vols 1-9 at definitely sewn, it looks like my vol 10 might be sewn but I need to look more carefully, and 11-12 are glued.

Ahhh it was the On-Demand ones….I got mixed up. Sorry all!