Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Book Is a Mess
One reason Taylor Swift is so beloved by her fans is her attention to detail. She leaves messages in liner notes, she references her own catalogue, and she’s meticulous about her live shows. So it’s understandable why some Swifties are upset about the quality of The Eras Tour Book, a $40 coffee-table volume that went on sale last week. Fans have been pointing out typos, low-quality images, and graphic-design blunders, dubbing Swift’s latest release The Errors Tour Book.
If you want to get a sense of it, you can watch this 20-minute video of someone flipping through the whole thing; if you don’t have that kind of time, you can see how slapdash the book is just by looking at the layout at the 7:10 mark.
A photo of Swift and her dancers in a kick line is spread across two pages, but because books have a spine, Swift completely disappears into the crease between them. This is the sort of thing a publishing professional with experience in making coffee-table books might warn you about. Unfortunately, Swift bypassed the traditional channels, opting instead to self-publish.
That’s just one example. Over on Reddit, fans found spelling errors throughout the book. The song “this is me trying” is written as “this is me rying.” One person found ten different mistakes in song titles on the page devoted to the surprise-songs portion of the tour.
On an r/TaylorSwiftMerch thread asking if the book is worth purchasing, the reviews were mixed. Some people said that, despite the errors, it’s a nice memento of the tour, while others called it “underwhelming.” One person wrote that it looks like “something a fan made on Shutterfly.”
Over on TikTok, one Swiftie has racked up more than a million views for pointing out not only the book’s grammatical errors but Swift’s clunky descriptions, which a deft editor would surely have cleaned up. “I am seriously questioning if this book was even edited,” user @emermore7 said. In discussing Swift’s brief passages explaining each era, the commenter said they “read like first drafts.”
“It’s giving high school yearbook editing :/,” wrote another commenter. “For 40$ it should be ALL HQ 4K pictures we have NEVER SEEN…. why are multiple pics from her ig and the Eras Tour movie????” wrote a third. “I don’t understand how this could happen. Her entire public persona is crafted around being a thoughtful and meticulous writer,” another pointed out.
So there are spelling mistakes, the writing isn’t up to par, the layout is wonky, and people are even alleging that some of the photos are just screenshots from the Eras Tour movie. Surely that has to be all — it’s not like one person had an entire section of the book missing from their copy?
Well, that would be nice. Unfortunately, one fan is claiming pages 49 through 66 are nowhere to be found in theirs. I can excuse a typo, but one thing about a book is that all the pages are supposed to be there.
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