Hyphenation: NOT random

So, I bought the Subterranean Press edition of Charles de Lint's new/old novel, Eyes Like Leaves. New, because it hasn't been published before; old, because he actually wrote it in 1980. It wasn't published because when he was going to offer it to the publisher who'd taken Moonheart and The Riddle of the Wren, his agent, who knew of Yarrow and Mulengro (one finished, one in progress), warned him that if he got three "secondary-world" fantasies in print so quickly, that would be his brand, and his unpublished contemporary fantasies wouldn't sell. Since Yarrow had shown him he wanted to write contemporary fantasies, he never published Eyes Like Leaves.

I like it well enough. I found myself thinking that the story wasn't catching me, probably because I haven't read much high, or secondary-world, fantasy in a while (like 25 years, probably, always excepting Terry Pratchett - who is radically different from de Lint!), but on second thought, I probably reversed the causation arrow there: I don't read much of this sort of fantasy because the stories don't catch me any longer...

Anyway, my actual reason for this post is different. Here's a quote from the book (p 197):

He felt, as well, the fine webs of the weavers
drawing closer, binding, finishing off the tapes-
tried tale that had begun so many longyears before.

You have no idea how long I tried to make "tapes-tried" make sense. In a book with words like "stormkin, longyear, deepseeing, stonewood, tree-wizard, sea-sleep," you learn to accept odd compounds. But "tapes-tried"?

Oh. Finally, I realized what had happened. Some damned automated typesetting program had hyphenated "tapestried" in the wrong place. Russian newspapers have long done this, just slapping in a hyphen when they reached the end of the line, no matter where in the word it fell. But English-language presses have generally tried to hyphenate on syllable breaks, even if it meant futzing a little with the spacing...

You know, I don't mind paying Subterranean's prices for their attractive special editions of hard-to-find books, especially when they're signed copies. But this particular book has several typos in it... and this, which completely jolted me out the (tenuous) hold the story had on me.

I think I'll be waiting for de Lint's next contemporary book.