Friday, March 5, 2021

The Book I Bought: The Efficiency Expert by Edgar Rice Burroughs

It's taken us 12 years to do it, but Joe and I are finally reading our last Edgar Rice Burroughs series: The Apache Duology. 1 That's not necessarily the end of our Edgar Rice Burroughs adventures, though, since ERB wrote 20 non-series books. 

I have all but 2 of those 20 books 4 (and the "missing" two can be had from the public library--they're a bit pricey to buy in book form and are not available electronically), but I had most of them (15) in Kindle e-book form. Joe and I have gone the Kindle route before ...and it was okay, but it's clear that Joe prefers to read a Real Book. So I thought I'd look around and see if I could find cheap versions of the remaining ERBs.

Since I am not buying used books from Amazon anymore (HEREHERE), I checked my usual suspects, and found that Thrift Books had most of the ones I was looking for...and at pretty reasonable prices. I also found (much to my surprise) that Walmart had quite a few of those books, also at reasonable prices. So I was going back and forth between those sites and a few others, trying to see what my best deal would be, and as I was scrolling through the Walmart ERB holdings I saw this:



Well. I liked that. Not for the lesbian overtones (not that there's anything wrong with that), but for the pulpy art style. And it was only $8.99. So I hit the button.

Well. It arrived yesterday, and I was kind of surprised at how big the box was. Not thick, but very long and wide. I wondered what kind of bizarre packing Walmart was using for their book orders. And then I opened the package and...it wasn't the packaging. This book was gi-normous. Check it out. 

Here's a normal sized book:


And here's that same normal-sized book with my new copy of The Efficiency Expert:


Mmm-hmmm. So yes, it is a bit unwieldy. I'm not very happy about that, but I have to admit that it is my own fault. In the details of the listing, it clearly says "Assembled Product Dimensions (L x W x H) 11.02 x 8.50 x 0.22 Inches." (And don't you love that "assembled product" descriptor?) To be honest, I just didn't think to look. Next time, though....

There's something else worthy of note. Going back to the listing on Walmart.com, here's how the title appears: 

The Efficiency Expert : The Best Book For Readers (Annotated) By Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Paperback)

I'm a big fan of annotations, so I took a quick look (even though it will be several months before I get to reading this book with Joe). And I was surprised that I did not seen one footnote...and no numbers in the text to indicate that there were any kind of notations, foot or otherwise. So I flipped to the back of the book. And there I discovered that the last 4 1/2 pages of this book (I'd tell you the page numbers, but alas, the pages are not numbered--which is yet another pain in the ass detail) are devoted to something entitled DETAILED 
BIOGRAPHY. Strangely, following that title is a parenthetical note:

( Non Readable )

Ummm...what? First off, a DETAILED BIOGRAPHY ( Non Readable ) does not equal annotations. Second off, what the hell does ( Non Readable ) mean in this context? I started reading, and I now have an explanation. Allow me to quote the first paragraph:

     "The story of the novel is like a act . Act which is performed in the real life . The story tells us soo many tgings which are related to yours daily struggle and compromise . We can also say that the author is well knowledge abiut anything which is happend around oneself and he also knew that how to solve that is the picture of real author . The novel is also claim to be most succesful novel for the author carrier and life ."

I shit thee not. The above is typed exactly as it appears in this book.
Now, I spent 23 years as a public high school English teacher, and (pardon my French and my lack of sensitivity here) I had to read thousands of shitty papers...some by students who were functionally illiterate, some by students who were not fluent in English. But I never read anything as bad as that paragraph above. And you know what? It gets worse from there. So I went back to the book proper and read the first chapter with bated breath. And...not a single typo. So at least there's that.

Still, I'd have to say that this is the worst version of The Efficiency Expert that I can imagine, so Edgar Rice Burroughs fans, beware. 



P.S. The publisher is listed on the Walmart site as "Independently Published," which isn't helpful, but the ISBN-13 is 9781080898398.

P.P.S. Okay, just one more quote from that DETAILED BIOGRAPHY ( Non Readable ): "...the novel is realated to the French revolution and the French war." The novel is set in 1920s Chicago, by the way.






1  For the record, here's a complete list of ERB's series: Barsoon (11), Tarzan (27 2), Pellucidar (7 3), Venus (5), Caspak (3), Moon (3), Mucker (3), Cave Girl (2), Barney Custer (2), and the aforementioned Apache (2). That's a total of 64 books (keeping in mind 3 ).

2  Including the two Tarzan Twins books and the posthumous collaboration with Joe R. Lansdale, The Lost Adventure)

3  One of these 7 is the Pellucidar  / Tarzan crossover, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, so it's on both lists.

4  And have read them on my own already, but am ready, willing, and able to have another go at them with Joe.

5  7 times: with the difficult to find for cheap Tarzan Twins books (there are two of them), with not difficult to find for cheap but I'd already bought an e-compilation that had them The Mucker Trilogy, and with the same story as with The Mucker books The Cave Girl duology. 

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