Let the Buyer Beware

Over the years, I have purchased a lot of books—for pleasure reading, for classes, as gifts, but I have never experienced the situation I had last night when I began to read one of my books for a summer preaching class (the book review is due a week from tomorrow!)

Everything started off okay as I eyed the cover—the title probably wasn’t as eye-catching as it could have been, but it is a book about preaching, so I wasn’t expecting too much:

When I turned to the title page, I was a bit confused. It seemed that the title and author seemed to be different than the title and author from the cover, but since it awkwardly said “Just in Time!” at the top, I decided that this must have just been a poorly-placed advertisement for another book.

Then I turned to the Table of Contents and noticed that, interestingly enough, the contents seem to be talking entirely about Easter, relating to the title page and not the cover of the book.

At this point, I started to get alarmed and began flipping through the pages. Sure enough, the first several pages were about Easter services, and then, suddenly, page 22 turned to page 43, the type font and type size changed, and the topic changed from Easter to Elijah.

Finally, it dawned on me what had happened: the book had been mis-bound, and I had segments of two separate books bound together.

First thing this morning, I ordered another copy off Amazon (after all, the book review is due in eight days!); hopefully the binding error was an isolated incident and they didn’t incorrectly bind the entire printing series!

Frustrating to say the least.