Recently ordered the third volume of the Lucian OCT. I was surprised to find that the book I received was a shiny garish blue hardback instead of the usual dark softer material with a faint blue dustjacket. Is this to save costs? And is there a way to tell which editions are like this?
The curse of print on demand, I fear. I bought the Oxford Pindar and it was terribly done - the page gutters were misaligned. I had to send it back.
What does OCT stand for?
OCT stands for Oxford Classical Texts:
Wow, for $88 a volume, you’d think they’d be more careful about high-quality production and making the volumes look nice together on the shelf.
Print on demand is fundamentally just another production technique these days. Publishers often use it on a case-by-case basis based on their economic analysis of whether it makes sense to maintain a bunch of copies of a particular title in a warehouse.
It’s different for low-priced public-domain stuff. It’s very common to see fly-by-night Chinese sellers on Amazon selling copies of these books that are extremely badly produced. Those are usually not too hard to avoid if you’re buying a new copy on Amazon, but on the used market it can be very difficult to tell what you’re getting: a nice old copy or a completely unreadable version produced from a low-resolution scan. They may list an ISBN that isn’t actually an ISBN for that book but for another, older edition.
welcome to the world of cheap and sometimes almost illegible (breathing marks especially) reprints which they have the gall to sell at full price. Just don’t order OCTs from Amazon or any online seller sight unseen. Haunt used books stores to find the original beautifully printed editions if possible.
I would say that the current OCT reprints are much worse than your average modern printing, the quality can be really quite appalling, unworthy of the name Oxford. If you need to get the newest OCT edition (say, Wilson’s Herodotus) and not just any decent Greek text, the printing is better but the binding is still awful - my 2015 Herodotus fell apart long ago. I would absolutely steer clear of the OCT reprints and try to find an old second hand copy instead, especially as the OCTs are quite expensive and you might get a much higher quality old book cheaper.
It really wouldn’t need to be this way with the OCTs - the Loeb classical library volumes (Greek with facing English translation) are still quite nice, durable books, and not too expensive, and the new editions they have been producing in the last few decades are typically very good, often much better than what they offered in the past (I mean the content, not just the binding). I can’t comment on the quality of the Loeb Pindar, though.
My go-to source for used classical books is abebooks.com (or .de, .fr. co.uk etc), where you can buy used books from independent booksellers. It is affiliated with Amazon though - if you really want to avoid supporting Amazon and would rather wish that all you money went directly to the small seller, it’s often possible the locate the seller’s own internet pages outside Abebooks and buy directly from them.
I agree with Dante, second-hand bookshops are the best source for copies from the days when scholarly publishers still believed in standards. Second-hand bookshops in university towns are a happy hunting ground. When I visit Cambridge this autumn for the 2022 Cambridge Greek Play, a double bill of Persians and Cyclops, I shall make sure to visit G. David’s, about the only one left. It was sad to learn that, in dark blue Oxford, Blackwell’s, which had an excellent second-hand department, is for sale.
Yeah, Abebooks is great. I used to use bookfinder.com, which refers you to other sites that have a given book. But after a while, once I eliminated all the sellers that I didn’t want to do business with (ebay, or spammers), all that was happening was that I would always click through from bookfinder to the first Abebooks link. I hadn’t realized that they were connected to Amazon, though. What a weird idea, for Amazon to operate (?) a business that nominally competes with them in their original and best-known market. Does buying through Abebooks result in any greater share of the money going to the bookstore? I disapprove mildly of Amazon’s anti-union stuff, but honestly, if a union can’t win an election, it’s ultimately the union’s fault.
Race’s new Loeb Pindar is excellent. The Teubner Schnell-Maehler Pindar is the standard scholarly edition. I’m no expert, but Bowra’s old OCT seems to be somewhat less appreciated these days.