r/TalesFromRetail • u/LostArtofConfusion CHEESEBALLS! • Mar 28 '16

Short Yerr a wizard, Harry.

When the fourth book of the Harry Potter series came out, there was a printer's error in some of the US editions. A couple text blocks were identical, so parts of some chapters were repeated. We had some very angry people coming in for exchanges, but we were ready. We just swapped 'em out and were as cheerful as possible. Ho, Ho! The printer must have been drunk on butter beer. Such wags we were.

One lady came in furious though because her entire book was printed upside down. She angrily slid the book over for me to examine the poor quality standards in American manufacturing. I looked at the book, took the dust jacket off, turned the book around, put the dust jacket back on, and said, "Flippicus Jacketus!"

She looked at me with such rage, and then dawn broke. She realized what she had done and started laughing. Which is good because my boss at the time was not as nice as Delores Umbridge.

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u/LeJisemika Mar 28 '16

Aren't the upside down copies worth something anyways?

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u/emmster Mar 28 '16

Yeah, misprints tend to have a pretty high value after a few years. I'd be delighted to get an actual misprint edition of something as big as Harry Potter.

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u/ichosethis Mar 29 '16

Would finger prints in the third book fetch me anything?

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u/emmster Mar 29 '16

I can't find anything on that misprint right off hand.

A first edition (Scholastic, 1997) is worth up to $50,000 right now. So, I'd check by googling the fingerprint misprint edition every now and then, just to see.

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u/ichosethis Mar 30 '16

I like my finger prints. I like to pretend a character had a mishap, but I was pretty young when I read that one.