Customer Reviews

El Dorado

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El Dorado by Baroness Orczy. Published by MobileReference (mobi).

This is a very good sequel to the Scarlet Pimpernel. More adventure awaits you, as in all of Orczy's books.

In March, 2008 I acquired the Echo Library edition of this book. It has the most quirky typos and mis-spellings. Lots of them. Clearly the text was scanned with an optical character reader with the usual consequent wrong letters substituted: "tinder" for "under", "iii" for "in", etc. Careless proof reading I thought, to have not gone through it and corrected. It turns out, no proof reading by Echo. They have lifted the text unchanged from Project Gutenberg, the on-line site where you can find tens of thousands of public domain books in their entirety to read there. All the same quirky typos right down to the straight apostrophes as opposed to smart apostrophes.

I have never been quite so conscious of (poor) book design either, as I was with this Echo edition. The margins are cramped to the edges of the page too far and the book is the most awkward proportion. It is just ever so slightly too wide with too small font to scan down the page in reading quicker if you wish. A line requires at least two side by side scans to take it in (and I have wider peripheral vision than many).

As to literary comment, I don't find this book as well-written or flowing as "The Scarlet Pimpernel", the first in this many-episode series. Orczy's diction is at times more awkward than its predecessor (although that may be the Echo/Gutenberg edition and it poor proofing). In this story her descriptions of situations, emotions of various people are frequently very repetitive as well, making the flow of the action more stilted.

I will go on to read "The Elusive Pimpernel" next, the action of which actually takes place before El Dorado and to which, in El Dorado, there are references to the events of "The Elusive Pimpernel". I will not however, be buying any more editions of anything from Echo Library. I prefer books from those who take more care in their publications. Perhaps, also, I'll volunteer to do some proof-reading for Project Gutenberg.