Google Books
So much for quality control. I downloaded the 1743 edition of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays from Google Books last night and found yet another instance of badly flawed copying from the University of Michigan. About thirty pages are missing from Volume I; about ten from Volume II; and three or four from Volume III. In Vol. II, a lot of pages are cut off at the top so that the page number or some text is missing. The first two volumes have quite a lot of colour images which frequently include the fingers of the copyist. Of the other editions I have, the 1711 is from Oxford, but the 1759 edition is also from Michigan. Volume I has a few missing and decapitated pages. Volume II starts well enough, but there are a lot of errors in the final 250 pages. Volume III has only trivial flaws relating to the margins of the pages. The problem is that there appears to be no way of informing Google about these problems. It’s possible to report illegible text, but not poorly done copying ...