Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It is with much regret that I must report that an otherwise excellent book has a major production flaw. As far as I can tell, it appears that the author's provided scanned images of many ancient documents to the designer at Princeton Architectural Press. The layout and type is all excellent. But, it looks like the majority of images were not properly sharpened in Photoshop (a standard procedure when using scanned images) before being imported into InDesign (or possibly QuarkXPress) for the production of the book. There are a few images that are sharp. They appear to be taken with a digital camera or are more modern timelines converted directly from EPS vector files for the layout. In one example you can see the original scan, fuzzy, and next to it a sharpened close up of a part of the very same image. If it is not a problem with the designer doing sharpening of images, than it is some kind of problem with the printer overseas either using the wrong image data or un-sharpening the images in some way. It does not appear to be a screen alignment issue or something physically done wrong in printing. (Although, on a few signatures, the text is foggy but I think that is the ink thinning out - a consequence, perhaps, of Princeton Architectural Press saving money by going to overseas for printing.) Why do sharp illustrations matter in this book? Because it is all about very detailed graphs. It is nearly useless because one cannot make out any of the details in the images printed in the book. Really a shame that this disaster happened. The designer and the editor should have caught this in the proofs and corrected it before publication. If it was entirely the printer's fault (it is could be) then Princeton Architectural Press has a good cause to go back to the printer and find out what happened and hopefully, the printer will redo it if it was the output or printer's mistake. The book would only be worth buying if very deeply discounted. If recalled and reprinted properly, I would give it 5 stars. It is otherwise a fascinating book.