Waste

Photo: Actualitté Publishing Perspectives reports that 55,000 copies of the French edition of Heated Rivalry are being pulped. The book is described rather charmingly at Actualitté as a “saga érotico-homo-hockeyeuse“. Is it only me that finds it a nice coincidence that a double T in the title is the cause of this story as well as the intentional typo in the name of the publication reporting it: a combination of actualités (current events) and littérature? Another quirk: behold how on a French paperback the title reads from bottom to top, while on an English-language book it’s the other way round — you can just make out that those books are face-up in their shrink-wrapped five-pack. (I once, many years ago, attended an afternoon-long meeting where we debated the direction in which spine titles should read. My recollection is that the key matter under debate was, when you stack your books horizontally do you put them face-up or face-down? We ended up deciding to do it one way on the…