I received a copy of Jake White’s autobiography - In Black and White, as a Christmas present. I am a total rugby nut and now that South Africa are Rugby World Cup Champions, again I might add, I could not wait to start reading his book. I took it along camping with me over New Years, and one afternoon, while reading my newly acquired gift, I get to this sentence:

Cape Town was wet To this day, Andre thinks I had sold him down the river with the letter.

Huh??? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I read it again, and then tragedy struck. Page 107 turned onto page 141. I searched frantically through the book to see if my missing pages had been incorrectly bound somewhere else in the book, but my worst fear came true. Pages 108 through 140 were gone. They never made it to Newlands on that wet day.

I waited until the new year before contacting the publishers to voice my disgust. The lady was very apologetic and immediately couriered me a brand spanking new glossy paged book. My Christmas present copy was made of that recycled brown toilet paper stuff that is slightly rough on the fingers, so I thought it was a nice touch of Zebra Press to send me a silky smooth paged version of In Black and White.

So the reading continued every evening now and then when I found a gap. I didn’t want to finish the book all in one go, you know. Save some for later I would tell myself.

Shiny Glossy Book Number Two

Then last night, while catching up on a chapter or two (I had now progressed 120 pages or so), I was once again, greeted with some strange grammar and punctuation:

So I learnt a lesson from his experience. given the week I had personally endured, as well as the players we’d lost, I didn’t have a great feeling about the game.

Don’t people use spell check when writing a book, or was the book typed with a typewriter and you couldn’t press backspace? I then cast my mind back to the last incident of this kind and thought, things like that don’t happen twice. It must be the part in the book where the writer took a drag of his zol or something… but once again, my worst fears were realised. Jake White had gone back in time, a whole 60 pages. Page 236 followed onto page 173. “This cannot be possible! Twice!”.

I was just about the give the book one big heave-hoe out the window, when I had a total brainwave! I could read page 237 in my other toiler paper version! Yippee!

I finished the chapter and put the book(s) down and realised this is exactly how SARU run SA Rugby. They use 2 books, that not one of them can be finished, yet, when one throws them together, and hopes for the best, somehow, you are able to produce something worth reading.

All’s well that ends well

You will be pleased to know that Exclusive Books will replace 1 of my books, and are going to give me a refund on the other. ;-) So now I have R200 to buy another book, and for that new book, all I can hope for is that the book-stickerrer-togetherer person can count, because Jake White surely can’t.