Tension, apprehension, and dissension

I was curious about something.  I have a print copy of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.  That book is famous, in part, for its use of weird typography.  I wanted to know if the digital copy had faithfully reproduced those quirks or not.

The answer is "yes and no."  Some of the quirks were scanned and cut-and-pasted into the digital file as images rather than text.  They have non-white backgrounds setting them apart from the rest of the page.  So they're there, but they're obviously not typed, and it makes the book look, in my opinion, a little clunky.  This is what it looks like in the Kindle previewer:

 And this is what the print version looks like in the preview:

Another example:

The print version:

Also, at least one of the instances was goofed.  Consider this selection from the Kindle previewer:

The "S.O.S." part is accurately reproduced.  The "SNOW" is copied and pasted from the print version.  But the "Blessings!" part is wrong.  It's correctly in bold type, but it's not the correct font.  In the print version, it looks like this:

So what conclusions can we draw from all this?  I don't know, other than "use standard type."  Yeah, these quirks are fun and all, but this is the digital age, and reproducing that stuff in an ebook file is going to present some challenges.  I suspect the digital version of The Demolished Man used the cut-and-paste method so that the words would actually render across a wide array of devices.  Not everyone has the same fonts installed, you know.  Images are universal.  But they're still images, not text, and they look out of place.

And, of course, the person doing the file conversion might miss something, as was the case with "Blessings!"  Or maybe it was intentional; maybe that person figured the unusual font was more trouble than it was worth and edited it accordingly.  I hope that's not the case--Bester was a subtle writer, and even seemingly insignificant things were meant to have underlying meanings--but you never know.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting comparison.

If you like science fiction, you should definitely read The Demolished Man.  It's a police procedural with telepathy.  It was the inspiration for the Psi-Cops in the tv show Babylon 5.  The character of Mr. Bester in that show was named after the author of the book.  And the story's got a neat jingle:

"Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun."