Adventures in the Ocean, Adventures in OCR

 I’ve lamented previously on these pages the near anonymity of Kenneth Roberts, once a best-selling American author and winner of a special Pulitzer Prize for his historical fiction. It’s not just that people who read Stieg Larsson or Patricia Cornwell don’t know Roberts. It’s that it appears the people who read Cather and Fitzgerald and Updike don’t know of him anymore, either.

Earlier this month, I read Roberts’s The Lively Lady. I didn’t know until I started reading that it was a part of his Nason family series, but it turns out that it is (at least!) the third in a series beginning with one of my favorite books of twentieth-century American fiction: Arundel. The series – Arundel, Rabble at Arms, and The Lively Lady – tells stories about the Nasons and other people from the Maine town of Arundel (pronounced a-RUN-del at the time, now pronounced ken-ne-BUNK-port), and all place them in American wars (as far as I know: maybe Roberts wrote other books about the Nasons of Arundel that I don’t know about). Lively Lady finds Richard Nason outfitting a privateer and going after the British in the War of 1812. It felt so much like Patrick O’Brian at times that I found myself subliminally rooting for the British before remembering: “Hey! They pressed our men from our ships!”

I enjoyed the story, but I did not enjoy the frequent typos from the weak optical-character-recognition scan. It seems that no one at Amazon reads Kenneth Roberts, either: they just scanned the book, left the file as is without any editing, and sold it for $9.49. My purchase alone probably paid for all the labor and overhead involved in the production of the faulty file. To give you an idea of the problems, I offer you a quiz. Match each word or phrase, as it appears in the Kindle version of The Lively Lady, with its definition or description. It helps a lot to think that the OCR is reading thick vertical lines correctly but tripping up on the thinner curves that join the verticals. Here are 10 “words” as they appear in the text:

1. fives
2. tinned
3. bum
4. bam
5. dumb
6. comers
7. yam
8. half fight
9. cudass
10. stem

And here are 10 definitions or descriptions for the words that Roberts actually wrote:

a. A building in which to house animals and to store seeds, fodder, and tools
b. A fighting blade
c. A tale; a strand of wool or other fiber
d. Changed the direction in which one is facing
e. The aft end of a ship
f. The celestial condition at mid-dawn or mid-dusk
g. The parts of the eyes out of which one looks with suspicion
h. What a privateer might do to a captured ship
i. What people spend in their hometowns
j. What the yokel did to the cliffs

OK, don’t scroll down farther until you’ve matched them all and are ready for the answers.


Answers below.


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Are you peeking before you should?


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Answers below.


And now:


The Answers

1-i: fives = lives
2-d: tinned = turned
3-h: bum = burn
4-a: bam = barn
5-j: dumb = clumb (i.e. climbed)
6-g: comers = corners
7-c: yam = yarn
8-f: half fight = half light
9-b: cudass = cutlass (Yes, cudass isn’t even a word.)
10-e: stem = stern