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Above the arch there was a lamp, and beneath it swung a large signboard: a fat white pony reared up on its hind legs. Over the door was painted in white letters: the prancing pony by barliman butterbur. Many of the lower windows showed lights behind thick curtains.

It appears just like that in my book. No quotes. No cursive writing. No special formatting whatsoever. But this is the case in numerous other places, so it's not my book being some sort of sloppy/weird edition.

There must be some special significance to this. But what? Why would he do this?

The fact that it's also all in lower-case letters, even though both "The Prancing Pony" and "Barliman Butterbur" are spelled like I just did everywhere else, makes me really wonder if this is actually a mistake.

bobble
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Yurechko
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    Could you please [edit] your question to include a citation for the quote (book, chapter, page)? That will make it easier for answerers. – bobble Apr 12 '22 at 13:37
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    More importantly, could you please tell us which edition you're reading? – Rand al'Thor Apr 12 '22 at 14:44

1 Answers1

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I've not been able to find a scanned early edition text in a quick search, but I have checked out the scanned copies of the 1994 Houghton Mifflin Edition and the 2001 Quality Paperback Book Club editions via the Internet Archive.

Both of these are fully authorised editions so can be expected to have a faithful rendering of the author's preferred typography. Both of these have the words that concern you capitalised. Text scan from Houghton Mifflin 1994 edition Text scan from 2001 Quality Paperback Book Blub edition.

What edition are you using? Does it pre or post-date the two editions illustrated? If you can tell us the edition people may be able to help identify if this is an error specific to that edition.

bobble
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Spagirl
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    This may be a case of piracy/"screen-scraping"/unauthorized edition, as the "small caps" would be "lower-case encoded" letters typeset using small-caps glyphs. If the type is pulled from e.g. a PDF and then bulk re-set in e.g. TImes it might lose small caps. – Yorik Apr 12 '22 at 18:05
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    My single-volume, rice paper edition has the same typesetting as in your photos. – Mick Apr 12 '22 at 21:12
  • Checked two editions, both illustrated by Alan Lee, and they have the same caps in this passage. – l0b0 Apr 13 '22 at 09:04
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    I agree with Yorik's assessment, that this represents a naive extraction of text from an e-book, or OCR mistaking small-caps text for caps-and-small-caps. Here's a pirated edition on the Internet Archive with the mistake. – Gareth Rees Apr 13 '22 at 11:40
  • As an aside, is this a standard mode of text on signage in the UK? Specifically the word "by" - as if implying that "The Prancing Pony" is a book, song, poem or something and Barliman Butterbur is its author. Seems a bit odd to my eyes to use that to refer to an inn and innkeeper. – Darrel Hoffman Apr 13 '22 at 14:00
  • @DarrelHoffman it isn’t now, I couldn’t swear to whether it once was. – Spagirl Apr 13 '22 at 15:58
  • Surely the sense of "by" here is "in the vicinity of; near, close to, beside" (OED). – Gareth Rees Apr 13 '22 at 16:36
  • I always understood "by" to indicate that he was the proprietor (in the sense of "owned/operated by") – Herohtar Apr 13 '22 at 19:03
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    @DarrelHoffman: It's not common, but it's not unheard of. It exists in the US too (eg with hotel brand names such as "Doubletree by Hilton"). – psmears Apr 13 '22 at 21:52