alt Hacker News The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
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Quarrelsome • today at 2:35 PM
they battered if you put it in your pocket. The idea of paper looking guilty chimes with the idea that you're reading it in the back of the classroom when you're not supposed to be.
I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".
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Presumably the ones from the library, which the author mentions was his source? Every Pratchett book I read as a kid matched this description, including being battered.