H.G. Wells: The Complete Short Story Collection

This is not a complete collection. 'The Land Ironclads' is not included. 'The flowering of a Strange Orchid' is missing, because 'The Empire of the Ants' is printed twice. The type-face and margins are just off. It's not as readable as a book should be.

This "complete" collection contains 49 stories by H. G. Wells - actually it's only 47, because one story is printed twice under different titles (A MOON LIGHT FABLE and THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT) and another "story" is actually an essay (ZOOLOGICAL RETROGRESSION). Compare that number with the 84 tales collected by John Hammond and published originally by Dent in 1998 and most recently by Gollancz in 2011.The stories are arranged in alphabetical order of title, with "A" and "The" included in the letter-count, which is against normal publishing practice. Also against established practice is the page-numbering, which prints the odd numbers on the left-hand side (verso) and the even numbers on the right (recto). The layout is basic and there is no supplementary material.Even so, with a more honest title and less slipshod editing, this could have been a perfectly acceptable print-on-demand edition of Wells's best stories (in all genres, from the fantastic to the farcical). But as it is, it falls well below professional publishing standards.

This publisher clearly did little more than copy and paste webpage versions of this story and maybe change the font. Good publishers spend a lot of time making the text readable to a person (spacing the text on page, selecting a typeface that is easy on the eyes, spending time with spacing between lines and spacing between the letters to promote easy reading, sizing the text properly, and numerous other details that make the text on the page enjoyable to read. This book is awful and anyone paying for it has been taken advantage of.

This book has printing errors, namely one of the short stories is duplicated and one left out. Unfortunately, the story left out, The Flowering of a Strange Orchid, was the most important to me. I have purchased two copies and both will be going back to Anazon.

H.G.Wells was always thinking, that's for sure. Just one complaint--notation somewhere of when each story was written would have been helpful.