English

Chance

Although this story is written in fairly simple language it is strangely difficult to follow. The setting is that of one man, an old ship's officer, telling another of the same a long story. The language slides between the two men, lighting pipes, making and answering comments, and so forth, and then back into the detail of the story, and sometimes deeper still, into conversations that take place in the story. This has its effect on the use of quotation signs. This is the hardest part of this book to edit. There are rules involving the use of these signs, and most books obey them all the way through, but in this book either the author was being experimental, or the typesetter was a bit confused. Because of the sliding in and out of the depth of the story, the quotes rules often vary from one paragraph to the next. What we have done is to make the quotes rules hold true for each individual paragraph right through the book, and as far as possible we have made the rules consistent from paragraph to paragraph. This is the second time that we have scanned the same copy of this book, and we just hope that we have made a good job of it. Conrad, Joseph, originally Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalec

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