It Also Means "having a diseased or run-down appearance"

I used the word scrofulous in an email this morning. Such a great word.

1. Relating to, affected with, or resembling scrofula.
2. Morally degenerate; corrupt: "a scrofulous, grim, darkly funny burlesque on art, celebrity, and love" Stephen Schiff.
(Thanks, Free Dictionary.)

Scrofulous. It just sounds irritated in your mouth when you say it, doesn't it? Scrofulous.

Anyway, I used it not in reference to any individual person but rather to a particular breed of book publishers who print nice clean facsimile copies of nineteenth-century books -- the sorts of books I like to read and to assign, the sorts of books that are hard to come by except through the scanning wonder that is Google books, but who wants to print out an entire book?

You would think that I would have nothing but praise for such publishers, and yet I call them scrofulous. Here's why. In the 19th century, it was quite common for novels to be published in three volumes. People knew that. People planned for that. They paid extra for library subscriptions that would let them take out more than one book at a time, so that they could have the entire three volumes at once and not have to wait for someone else to finish volume III and return it before they could find out how the story ended. Once a book was tremendously popular, sometimes it was reissued in a single-volume format which would be cheaper, largely because you would only have to pay to get one book bound instead of three. Back in those days, when people bought books, they bought the pages inside, and then they took them to their bookbinder of choice to "put between boards" which meant to create the binding and cover. That's why, when you go into libraries in really old houses, all the novels might be bound in the same red leather covers. Not because the publisher necessarily issued them that way, but because that's the cover the owner chose to have put onto all of his books.

Anyway, back to scrofula. These "great" reprint publishers who are resurrecting long-out-of-print books today? Are touting them as "new" and as "facsimiles" and all things good. Only when you order the book from Amazon, let's say, for the not cheap price of $19.99, it arrives, and you find that it in fact contains ONLY VOLUME II of the original. Seriously. Only the middle volume. As if anyone in her right mind would be excited to start reading a book a third of the way through, try to figure out what's been happening up to that point, and then stop before the end. For $19.99!!

Not only that, but the cover of the book isn't marked to say "Volume II," and the book description doesn't say, "buy 1/3 of this great book from us and have hours of extra-added fun trying to guess what happens before and after the part we're willing to send you." Nor do they also publish volumes I and II separately.

If that's not scrofulosity, I don't know what is.

(Amazon, I must say, has been awesome, and is taking the book back, no questions asked, and even is willing to refund shipping.)

Do these publishers think we won't notice? That a book that starts on "Chapter 12" won't raise any suspicions? That it's just "old" stuff anyway and that no one really cares about that stuff enough to be bothered?

Or are they just stupid? Did they just grab books from Google books without paying much attention to what they were then reprinting? The books there often turn out to be only one volume of a multi-volume set because the good folks at Google are scanning each individual volume as a separate file, and many single novels in the now-out-of-copyright centuries were multi-volume affairs. But I KNOW that about old books, and I can read the cover sheet on Google to know that I'm only getting one volume. Apparently, these book publishers can't. Or think I can't.

Either way, I call that scrofulous. How do you sell a "new" book without disclosing that it's actually only 1/3 of a book?

I'll be these folks even look morally contaminated. I hear scrofula is a nasty disease. That kind of moral turpitude must show up in your face after a while, don't you think? Unless it's the Dorian Gray publishing company. In which case, I'm betting that they never read the last few chapters of that novel to know that, eventually, that immoral stuff you do all comes back to haunt you.

Honestly. Selling the middle 1/3 of a book as if it were the whole thing. What will they think of next?