Atiqa Chowdhury

Product Review 

February 9th, 2022

Secret History Ivy Books Edition: Product Review 

Books have multiple editions, and choosing the right one can prove to be an interesting task. Despite being portable, the 1993 Ivy books mass market paperback copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt is not worth buying because of its awkward pages and flimsy material. This edition is 503 pages and four by eight inches long. It’s a paperback with a white paperboard cover that has a glossy red title font. The paper spine and book is bound with adhesive and the cover is around 250 gsm paper. Its light yellow pages are about 75 gsm and have dark black 11-point font that’s a variation of Georgia. The book weighs around 16 ounces.

This edition is really small and portable. It’s the length of an average hand, making it easy to stick in a bag for reading on the go. It’s still five hundred and three pages, so it’s too thick to place in smaller handbags which can be inconvenient. Generally speaking, if you were to be carrying a .61 inch thick laptop, bottled water, and a notebook in your tote, the book would fit quite right. However, no noticeable weight would be added to a bag, which can motivate readers to continue with a novel. Despite its inconvenience with thickness, the portability of this novel is the biggest asset. 

The awkward page format created a difficult reading experience. The paper size is four by eight, so the sentences have .8 inch line spacing and the words are squished on the page. This made the words hard to read because it was easy to get lost on the page. When reading one would have to put the book close to their face to see comfortably. Margins are only about .25 inches wide, and as an avid annotator, this made things extremely annoying. I was unable to write anything of substance on the margins without making awkward turns on the page. An average ballpoint pen and highlighter on its 70 gsm paper will leave minimal ghosting. The Georgia font and the dark black color of the words aided with but didn’t compensate for, this awkward page layout and overall weird reading experience.

This edition didn’t weather well to regular wear and tear. The book came often with me to the subway and was read in bed. Because the binding is just adhesive, the cover detached quite easily after 100 pages. There are noticeable scratches on its as well as the spine, which started peeling as soon as I opened the novel. A third of the way through 200 pages detached from the spine and started ripping. The adhesive binding makes the book virtually impossible to lay flat since the page pockets were too large. Even slight creasing leads to pages, and spine, falling apart and breaking.

Overall, this edition was not worth purchasing. It was easy to carry but deteriorated fast with regular use, and books should be able to withstand that, especially for a mass market paperback. Also, the pages made it hard to annotate and read the novel as a whole.