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The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick O'brian
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $175.00
Buy New: $110.24
You Save: $64.76 (37%)
New (21) Used (9) from $90.00
Rating:  76 reviews
Sales Rank: 7863
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 6980
Number Of Items: 5
Shipping Weight (lbs): 9.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 8.2 x 5.4
ISBN: 039306011X
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780393060119
ASIN: 039306011X
Publication Date: October 30, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A handsomely bound omnibus edition of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring classics, including three chapters of the unfinished twenty-first novel.
These five volumes, beautifully produced and boxed, contain over 7,000 pages of what has often been described as a single, continuous narrative. They are a perfect tribute to such a literary achievement, and a perfect gift for the serious O'Brian enthusiast.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
 Inexcusable, incomprehensible, insulting, insane. December 2, 2008
Someday Maywe
The books are very pretty, so long as you don't read them. Then, it's as if someone had firmly grasped the volumes one by one and shaken them hard enough to actually loosen the printed text. Words, sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, individual letters -- all jumbled, tumbled, and confused. Is it Stephen speaking, or is it Jack? Judging by tone and vocabulary, Stephen; not that a few quotation marks, hard returns, and indentations wouldn't help; but wait! -- yes -- comedic misspellings, dashes for hyphens, commas instead of periods at each full stop forty times running -- what are mere monolithic slabs of fused dialogue compared with this wonderland?
All bitter, bitter sarcasm aside, this edition is a disgrace. Either no one proofread it, or someone did, and didn't give a damn that nine chapters out of ten end like Finnegans Wake. If Everyman's Library published just one Updike novel, say, with just one-fourth of the typos in an average Norton O'Brian, readers would hurl it away as a taunt, an outrage, criminal sloth. If the Library of America, say, published *Leaves of Grass* without apparently caring for Whitman's own views on punctuation, there'd be a mass recall and a mass editorial cleansing. Norton, those heroes, spelled mass with an e, turned on the random colon inserter, and worked like fiends to honor a great writer's legacy with super attractive slipcovers.
Buy the paperbacks. It's what's on the inside that counts.
 Satisfyingly complete September 8, 2008
Cory D. De Torres
How satisfying to have all the Aubrey/Maturin books in a nicely printed, hardcover edition. While volumes which contain multiple books are often unwieldy and difficult to hold, these are quite pleasant in the hand. If you are fascinated by Patrick O'Brian's recreation of early 19th. century life at sea (and on land as well), these are a must.
 Wonderful writing, bad edition September 5, 2008
J. A. Chuppe (Indiana, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I feel conflicted about giving this set of books only three stars.
On one hand, O'Brian's writing is brilliant. Speaking purely in terms of the literature, I would give his work five stars rather than three. I would describe this work as a combination of Herman Melville and Jane Austen. This set really consists of one long novel, not 25 short ones. For that reason, it makes sense to purchase all of the volumes at once.
Unfortunately, the publisher of this set did a distressingly careless job of proofreading the layout. (Had the editors been aboard one of Jack Aubrey's ships, they would have gotten flogged for their slovenly ways.) There are errors every couple of pages: stray punctuation marks, letters out of place, and even some sentences that seem to be cut in half or spliced in the wrong spot. While the frequent errors seldom prevent one from understanding the text, they are endlessly annoying, particularly in books that otherwise have the look and feel of a luxury edition. O'Brian's work deserves better than this.
Great Gift September 4, 2008
M. Smith
My husband wanted this set and they were all he had hoped. It's a beautifully packaged compilation and there was no damage during shipping. A+++!
Flawed edition of a masterpiece July 14, 2008
S. Boyce (London UK)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
What should have been the definitive edition of these works has evidently been done on a penny-pinching budget (very probably copy-edited by a student earning vacation money). The misprints at some points really do detract horribly from the prose. Especially annoying for an author who took so much trouble to produce perfection.
An additional error, which I didn't see mentioned yet, is that in the unfinished 21st book, where the handwritten prose takes over from typed prose, the first page of handwritten prose (which overlaps with the typed version and is included in the stand-alone version of this book) has been inadvertently omitted and there is a gap of a couple of paragraphs. More evidence of how slapdash this edition is.
So I have to end up saying - this is despite everything a good value edition, but caveat emptor. And a *huge* thumbs down to the publisher for producing a product that shows so very little respect for their author. Even after all these reviews, they have not cared to produce a corrected edition.
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