Running Out of Ink . . .

Example of normal Deathly Hallows page*


Example of light and blurry page (for real--the page looks like this)


That Deathly Hallows book I bought contains a strange misprint that I've not seen anywhere on the Internet. I wonder if it's just mine.

The ones I've heard about contain upside-down and missing pages. The unhappy people who obtained these books are now selling them on E-Bay for egregious sums of money to make up for their "lost Harry Potter" moment.

Mine's pretty cool. At first, I thought it was a trick that I was too stupid to understand. After I realized I had a misprinted first edition, I lamented eating the chocolate bar while thumbing through the book. It's RARE, so I should have worn gloves while reading it.

Here's what happens: At one point, Harry and Ron and Hermoine are off looking for Horcruxes when they go to find Luna at her father's house. So they're having a big fight over whether or not Harry can say the "V" word and then Ron decides the saying of the "V" word by Harry is how Voldemort (oops) is tracking them down. And then Harry says:

"Because we used his name?"

And Ron responds:

"Exactly! You've got to give them credit, it makes sense. It was . . ."

And then the next two pages appeared to be blank.

When my eyes adjusted, I realized they weren't blank--just grey and fuzzy.

Ron continued, lightly and blurrily:

"only people who were serious about standing up to him, like Dumbledore dared to use it. Now they've put a Taboo on it, anyone who says it is trackable--Quick and easy way to find Order members! They nearly got Kingsley--"

Okay, so that explained that. The text was grey from 390 to 391. Then it went back to black until 398 to 399 to honor the trio's arrival at Lovegood's house. It turned grey on 406 to 407 to signal how important it was that Hermoine read "The Tale of the Three Brothers" aloud to Ron and Harry. And then it turned grey again on 414 to 415. I don't know why. They're only just blabbering about the Hallows on these pages.

It looks like the printer ran out of ink. I had to laugh. Imagine this book being sent to the printer via some ghostly railway line and then it gets there and they run out of black ink.

This happened because there's another Horcrux out there.

* Note: I do not have a good camera and the images were changed from color to black and white so that the white space did not show up as yellow. It doesn't photograph well, but you get the idea.