I’ve been writing book reviews for so long that when I started cuneiform tablets were still fashionable. These days I review books fairly regularly for a well-known magazine I enjoy but won’t name (clue – it’s not Nature, New Scientist or Nuts).

Now, call me old-fashioned (go on, I dare you), but when I review a book, I actually read it. I make notes. I go back to parts I hadn’t quite understood, and read them again. I look up references. I look at the blurb (and laugh). I look at the press release (and cry). I re-read my notes (both at once). And all for the sum of a fairly modest night out for two (but only if they are hamsters, on a diet).

For all this I expect to be given a book. Not because it’s a freebie (which it isn’t, as the work I put in is never compensated by the meager sum I’ll be paid), but because I expect to be delivering an opinion on a product which people will be able to buy themselves, so I wish to put myself in the position of an honest reader, reading the same thing that people will buy.

This is especially important if my imperishable words, however mangled, are to adorn some future edition of the work in question. If I am not sure that my words are being used to endorse the same product that a reader might buy, I feel, first, that I am being asked to review a pig in a poke, and, second, that I am colluding in the perpetration of a dishonest act on the reader – hey, Joe Schmo (or it could be Jill Schmo, I don’t care, I don’t want to be sexist or anything), I seem to say, you thought you were buying this product, but actually you’re buying something slightly different. The classic bait-and-switch manoeuvre.

Time was when the publisher would actually supply the book, the finished product. In recent years, however, they supply something different – the bound, uncorrected proof. I am a little uneasy about this, for the reasons given above, but at least the book looks and feels like a book, even if there are a few typos and some of the conventional front matter or a few of the pictures aren’t quite in their final form.

The excuse for sending proofs rather than the shop-ready article is that the book hasn’t quite finished going through the production process, and the publisher should like the book to be reviewed at the same time as it’s launched, for maximum impact. This may seem reasonable, but it isn’t – it reflects laziness and incompetence. It would do no harm for publishers to reschedule their timetables so that reviewers would be able to see a finished product. Moreover, if the technology now exists to produce books on demand within minutes, the whole business of old-fashioned book production, which takes months, becomes less excusable. It’s not even as if book publishers invest the resources they once did in trained copy-editors, judging from some of the howlers I see in books that have (obviously) been passed for press.

Normally one lets this pass, but these points came to a head a few years ago when I was reviewing a book (as a set of proofs) for Fucus – The Journal for the Seaweed Fancy (not its real name). The book was from a (hitherto) reputable publishing house and the authors were well-known. But the proofs were so full of typos, not to mention appalling errors of fact, that I was frankly amazed that any competent author would have left them in a first draft, let alone in a finished product. I began to question whether I could trust anything that was being put in front of my eyes. As any prospective employer will tell you (or any journal editor, for that matter), a cover letter th4t s foll of musproints will propel your curriculum vitae into the data destroyer

A data destroyer, yesterday

… faster than a greased ferret can run up a Teflon™ trouserleg, the ferret having just had capsicum shoved up its rectum.

As a reviewer of this book, I felt duty bound to make all this clear in my review, as I didn’t want my name attached to any kind of endorsement for such a badly put-together work. The reviews editor for Fucus was having none of it, and several drafts later we agreed by mutual consent to abandon the review.

Even worse than bound proofs are unbound proofs, sheaves of printed paper held together with bulldog clips. These look even less like books – what’s more, they are extremely unwieldy and hard to read. These are beyond the pale – as well as being dishonest, they don’t even look like books – so how am I meant to convey an authentic reading experience to prospective purchaser?

Which brings me back to the start, when, you’ll recall, I’d agree to review two books for this magazine I enjoy but won’t name (clue – it’s not Nature, New Scientist or Nuts).

Well, I got home last night, and found on the desk of my palatial office suite …

My palatial office suite, before Bluebell (pictured) went to audition for ‘The Eggs Factor’.

… a large envelope from the magazine, containing not one but two piles of bulldog-clipped paper, to one of which was appended a scribbled note from the publisher that read as follows.

1. apologies for unbound proofs, but these are the best I can do in the time.

I wrote to the editor of the magazine concerned saying that if I had presented my reviews full of typos, over-length, and late, with a note to the effect that this was the best I could do in the time, then the editor would have every right to reject my review.

I hope that the editor will be able to get bound proofs for me, at least, so that battle might at last commence…