I am glad that we are living in a world where daily blogs — freely available on the internet — can be published, thus rewarding the writers for providing all those hours of free entertainment.

Herring’s blog, Warming Up, is frequently hilarious and this collection of early entries stands up pretty well. It introduces us to the world of Consecutive Number Plate Spotting and the idea that being a writer is the hardest job in the world, the book adding context with footnotes and prefatory remarks to each month.

I would give it five stars, but the first edition is a catalogue of absolutely appalling typographical errors and spelling mistakes. Misplaced apostrophes, unnatural italics and strange footnote conventions blight what is otherwise a fun read.

Wait for the second edition when these things will hopefully have been corrected.

Apart from the little problem with the apostrophes, I think everything else you mention come down to differences of opinion on matters of style.

For example, we wanted a way to separate new writing by Rich, from the stuff that was in his blog, and opted for those half italics. We felt full italics were harder to read.

Very occasionally, we had two footnotes on one page, hence the numbering system.

There are some real typos there, but as far as I am aware only four made it through.

Chris

Here’s a few things that spring to mind:

In the introduction, the italics are absolutely unnecessary. Thing is, they don’t look like italics; they look like a normal serif bent at an angle.

Numbers in body text (e.g. p.56) look better when in small caps.

Apostrophes abused. Numerous examples. p.136 anything that is something ‘n’ something should have two 9 apostrophes.

Footnotes follow strange logic. Should either be endnotes (and thus have consecutive numbers) or use asterisks. Otherwise, it looks like it was typeset with Microsoft Word.

Lots of orphans and widows as well.

Read Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style it is fantastic.

Hope this helps. Sorry to put a downer on what is a laudable endeavour. Best, Neil

Sorry to hear the about the typos in our book spoiling your enjoyment.

We are a small operation, but we paid for the book to be proofread and typeset professionally.

Can you give me some examples of the problems? We probably won’t ever do a reprint – but in case we do it would be good to fix these up.

Chris

The Elements of User Experience and Web Form Design were both thought provoking, but I find it difficult to really engage with web design books unless I have a very specific problem I need to solve. And if I do have a specific problem to solve then I don’t tend to have any time for reading books.