Let me start off by making another confession (it's been a while since my last one). On Saturday I actually managed to buy 3 books whilst on a little wander round in Northampton. The idea was to go there, have a little wander then get some freshly ground coffee from this nice little specialist coffee shop and then go home. However, I strayed into the British Heart Foundation shop and came out with three books. Two Graham Greene ones and one by Sebastian Faulks. Then on Sunday I managed to acquire a further 2. This was when I was on my way to meeting a friend for some coffee. Whoever put the Willen Hospice Book shop on the way to Costa Coffee is to blame. I just did what came naturally to me... buy books. So that means that the books count has gone up considerably.
Books bought: 5
Books to be read: 78
Good news is: I finished one as well!!!!!
Again, it is sort of a factual one so I will not be putting the spoiler alert up for it since there is no plot to spoil. If you cannot guess from the title what it is going to be about you are in serious trouble. So, if you do not want to know anything about haunted pubs, inns and taverns all over the UK stop reading now.
Haunted Taverns - Donald Stuart
The book is a collection of ghostly happenings in pubs all over the UK. Apparently England's pubs are haunted by a great variety of things. There are lots of fair maidens looking for lost lovers, lost children, lost husbands and lost virtue. There are smugglers who used the pubs as their watering holes and got captured and/or killed by constables or pub owners. It's amazing how many pubs seem to have people and animals walled up in a part of the building. There are reports of flying glasses, chairs being moved, people disappearing down hallways and into walls, barrels of beer being disconnected while no one is around, poltergeists pinching ladies' bottoms and even horses running around in the bar area of pubs. It's frankly amazing what happens in some of these places - and not just after midnight either. The author has gone around all the counties in England and collected all the tales he could find (be it those passed on by pub frequenters or pub owners) and has listed them alphabetically thus making for a neat and orderly set of tales. This is where my joy of reading the book ends.
It is the first book I have ever read that I felt the need to write a letter to the publisher about. The reason is that it is one of the most sloppy editing jobs I have ever seen! Let me clarify.
First of all there are the spelling mistakes. I am not always perfect in my spelling but some of the ones in this book are just so obviously wrong that I do not believe anyone has ever looked at the text properly prior to it going to publication. There are mistakes in the text that you literally trip over when reading. They are obvious and should have been picked up easily by an experienced editor.
Secondly there is the issue of grammar. In my opinion the author has a strange way of ordering his sentences. He tends to split up parts of sentences that I feel belong together. E.g. on page 26 the entry for the Bell Hotel, he writes:
A servant girl has been seen on many occasions dressed in eighteenth-century fashion in an upstairs room.
I would have written: On many occasions a servant girl dressed in eighteenth-century fashion has been seen in an upstairs room.
If you look at his sentence structure it can be interpreted as: many times people saw her she was wearing clothing from the eighteenth-century but at other times she was perhaps wearing 20th or 17th Century style clothing. I do not think this is how he wants the reader to interpret his sentence. He has several more of these strange sentence structuring issues. I am not going to name them all as that would take up way too much space in this review. However, for the fans...... one more example from later on in the book that got me really confused at the first reading is on page 64. Here, in the entry for the Hand & Shears in London we read:
In the sixteenth century on 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, the mayor came out of the inn to pronounce the market open and cut the first piece of cloth to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears.
On the first reading I though that the piece of cloth was going to be sold with a pair of tailor's shears but on reading it again (and again) I realised that the mayor used a pair of tailor's shears cut the first piece of cloth to be sold. I feel that weird sentence structuring like this makes the book much harder to read than it should be. I kept coming across sentences that I had to re-read a few times to get the meaning and this stopped me in my reading flow. I could not really get into the text because I noticed so many issues with it that it hampered my enjoyment of the book.
What also really confused me at times was his use of comma's. They seem to be everywhere when you do not want them and not to be found when you feel they are needed/required. I think I once counted about 8 in one sentence!!
A further issue is the use of verbs. Sometimes they are left out altogether and other times he seems to have a strong attachment to the verbs to have and to be. They occur in just about every other sentence you read. I am sure there are enough conjugations of both of them to fill about twenty books just from this little publication.
One other major thing that really annoys me is that the editor has not even bothered to do a check on the pictures in the book. If you look at page 77 there is a close up of a pub interior. Now look at page 10 and you will see a zoomed out shot of the same picture! On page 10 it is referred to as the Cross Keys in Pulloxhill and on page 77 it is said to be the George Hotel in Dorchester on Thames. So which one is it? A second picture issue is found on page 73. A pub (Ye Olde Cross) is said to be "locally... known" as the "Dirty Bottles". Really?? Why then is it that when I look at the picture with this entry that I can make out from the parts of the letters that are showing that it actually has the words Dirty Bottles on the front of the pub? Does that not mean that the place is actually called Dirty Bottles rather than "locally... known" as it?
Sloppy.. very, very sloppy! Not only is it sloppy but it also made me wonder if all the other pictures are correct. Furthermore, if they cannot even get their picture captions right what does that say about the rest of the text in this publication? Has the author actually collected genuine tales from people, has he even been to any of these places or has he just made up things that he thought would sound good?
One last that struck me is that the author has several names for the observed ghostly apparitions. Sometimes he calls them simply "ghosts", then "indwells" or even "other worlders". It's kind of cute, but I would rather call a spade a spade.
Title: Haunted Taverns
Author: Donald Stuart
122 pages
Tempus Publishing
ISBN nr 978-0-7524-4347-8
Books to be read: 77
PS: at the time of writing the review there was no reply yet to my letter to the publisher.
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