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I remember studying "The Catcher in the Rye" back in high-school, and before we started to read we were provided with a few critical analysis pieces for orienta

I remember studying "The Catcher in the Rye" back in high-school, and before we started to read we were provided with a few critical analysis pieces for orientation. One of these was a discussion of the difference between the UK and American editions the key of which was the omission of italics in the former. Now anybody who's read TCITR will know the importance of italics to the narrative. The UK editor didn't believe they were important, perhaps objected to them on aesthetic grounds and so they were stripped out. We did of course reading the re-released, American edition, printed as the author intended.

cstross 10y ago
Apropos which, one of the whackinesses of modern publishing is that Adobe InDesign, the publishing package that has mostly displaced Quark in the typesetting biz, frequently loses italics when importing a Microsoft Word document. And if the author suffers from middle-aged memory issues (as is quite common, because a "young" author is anyone under 45) there's a good chance they'll forget to put them back in when they're checking the page proofs.