problems with the the printing

Following on from my complaints (reasonable I think) about printing and/or binding errors in previous books on this list - Bluesman, Lolita and The Lay Of The Land, and related complaints about the frequency of typos in The Falls and Eternity, here's a little oddity in A Question Of Upbringing, prominent and worthy of note mainly because it's literally in the first line of the first chapter of the book. Have a look:

If you're struggling to see it, here's a similar screenshot from this video, of a version of the book that doesn't have the error:

If you still can't see it (there are two successive a's in the first sentence), that will be for the same reason that people sometimes struggle to see the deliberate error here:

I would assume that's the reason why it slipped through the proof-reading process for my 1980s Flamingo paperback. 

The linked video above, which I will confess to not having sat through the full hour of, also touches on a subject that, for instance, Powell's Wikipedia page is a bit silent on, but seems like an obvious question that one would want to ask: did he know before writing A Question Of Upbringing that he was embarking on a 12-novel cycle, or even a multi-novel cycle, or did it evolve as he went along? It's surprisingly difficult to find any related information, but this page has an explanatory paragraph:

Powell started writing the first novel, A Question of Upbringing, in 1948. At that stage it was intended, according to Spurling, to become the first part of “at least a trilogy”. By 1956, when Powell was writing the fourth novel, “what was originally planned as three volumes or a little over had grown to eight or nine.” In early 1962, when Powell was beginning the seventh novel, “he finally made up his mind to allocate three books to the Second World War, and complete the entire sequence in twelve volumes.” Apart from mentions of two scrap-books of scribbles and ideas, these scattered references are the only information Spurling imparts of how Dance was conceived and planned. This is a huge disappointment.

The references to "Spurling" there are to Hilary Spurling who wrote a biography of Powell in 2017, to generally more complimentary reviews than the implicit one in the quoted paragraph above. Note that the Guardian review I linked to there is written by Claire Messud, who also features on this blog.