You're right that the first paragraph is bad - but it's uncharacteristically bad. Maybe the translator/editor was still warming up his workflow at the start and

You're right that the first paragraph is bad - but it's uncharacteristically bad. Maybe the translator/editor was still warming up his workflow at the start and never went back to revise it for some reason. I think you'll find the bulk of the book to be much better. At the very least, the English prose itself flows beautifully. And clearly the typesetting and restoration of the illustrations are truly top-notch. The first few pages are really an aberration. Considering the project is open source at https://gitlab.com/mirtitles/perelman-geometry https://gitlab.com/mirtitles/perelman-geometry, I'm tempted by the obviously-high level of effort to help patch up a lot of these problems in the early chapters.