. Makes one wonder how the authors of all the "junk" books ever get on the market.
TL MC

Indeed it does! I've seen more mediocre books with fancy pictures of awful
salmon flies than I can count and I wonder who buys them, much less why a
publisher would pay to print it!

That's not limited to fishing books. Before I retired, 11 years ago,
I saw a number of "academic" books that could only be called "junk
science."

One I recall, entitled _Media Economics_, published by Sage, was only
about 150 pages long but contained (I counted them) 73 errors of
economic analysis.

Another, about the economics of newspapers, had chapters on demand,
supply, and elasticity. The author didn't understand any of those
three fundamental economic concepts.

One reason is that to save money, publishers no longer employ editors
in the old-fashioned sense of the word. One day a kid barely out of
college popped into my office and announced he was "the social
science editor" for Prentice-Hall or McGraw-Hill or some-such formerly
respected publishing house. He was really a salesman.

vince