I've never read Joe Hill, but I've always thought Ligotti was taking a bit of a dig at Stephen King in his meta-horror story "Notes on the Writing of Horror" (or at least at King's brand of horror):
And so on and so forth. You get the idea.
I remember reading one book with that character several times, perhaps in second grade. I don't think I was ever aware that it was part of a series. I would probably have liked to see the other books. Our library (school and local) did have several series that I visited often -- Danny Dunn (boy scientist), the Limerick series (boy with mysterious chemistry set), the Tucker series (of which I only knew about one book, the one I owned), and a few others. But those stick in my mind the most.
My hypothesis is that older books are simply scanned and run through an optical character recognition (OCR) process. So all the typos are just scanning artifacts imperfectly recognized by the OCR. Maybe even printing artifacts that appeared as ignorable spots of ink in the original work, but which the OCR is programmed to try to turn into characters.
Interesting take. I would think that they'd at least run it through a spell-checker because there were some quite egregious errors there.
Noted in a previous post where I revised and published my book I've gone over a hundred times. Then one second after pushing the Publish button I found a typo on the back cover.
I guess it's like an artist turning their in-progress painting upside-down to catch composition problems. Or (back in the day) having someone else Verify the punch cards you made. (There was a Verify feature on advanced models where one would submit a previously punched card, and re-type in the same data. The keyboard would freeze if there was a difference. You could then correct it and continue, then slide in a new card and it would punch a new, corrected one.) If you just Verified the cards yourself, often you'd make the same typo, which is why you had someone else do it -- sometimes it was their only job.
Mine is self-published on Amazon -- I'll have to check out that feature.
I'm a great fan of those. The two great scenes for me are the debauched sloth and Audrey's crew doffing hats when he stands in the pillory.
The Ionian Mission has the scene where Aubrey goes into battle with a French ship without drawing and reloading from his gunnery exercise using fireworks powder that makes different colored fire and smoke. The French think it’s a secret weapon and retire.
I saw an NBC Children's Theater Episode based on this in 1972, when I was seven. Until now, I'd never known that it was adapted from a book series. I remember assuming that, because they were showing stock footage of the moon landings, that the expedition must have been to the moon, but I also remember Miss Pickerell's saying something about how one of the astronauts brought her "red rocks for my collection," which obviously implies Mars.
I read all the Hornblower books when I was in college (the first time) and really enjoyed them. I read Master and Commander about 15 years ago and liked it even better, but my local library's copy of Post Captain (the second book in the series, for those unfamiliar) had gone missing, so I didn't continue the series. I really need to see if they've replaced it, or, if they haven't, acquire one myself.
From the description it seems that the program adapted three of the books.
I keep forgetting that I can borrow books from the local library on my Kindle. But my Prime membership often gets me access to the (older) ones I want anyway. And I find it odd that the library often has a waiting list for a digital copy of a book.
Always worth it. I have completed 4 circumnavigations, and many short voyages, and they never fail to please. A recent trip to the Historic Dockyards in Portsmouth brought it all very much to life for me.
