I recently bought a copy of City & Guild online. I get it, open it up to around the middle, and find... a section on fertility magic. I soon notice that the header at the top of the page says "Ancient Magic." Looking through the book, I find that nearly fifty pages are from the book Ancient Magic, with the corresponding City & Guild pages missing.
The next day I stop by a used bookstore I frequently visit, and see that they have coincidentally just put out a fair number of 5th edition books, including City & Guild. I open it up... and see that it has the exact same problem as the one I have.
So I'm wondering how common this is. Has anyone else here encountered this? Maybe I should post this in the Ask Atlas forum, but I thought I'd see if anyone here has heard of this or seen it.
That is... odd. And very not-good. I've brought this to John Nephew's attention; thanks for mentioning it. Unfortunately, I'm thousands of miles from the Atlas warehouse, so I can't check the stock.
A portion of the print run of City & Guild was defective, with this error as described. When we learned of the error, we checked the remaining copies in our warehouse, removed the ones that were defective, and sent them to the recycling center.
When we still had the book in our warehouse, we were able to send people replacements, but we sold out some time ago. The best thing at this point is to return it to the retailer for a refund or exchange; then they get credit from a distributor, who gets credit from us. Otherwise we could exchange a different in-print 5th edition book for it.
There should be very few of these defects out there, so I suppose the hardcore collector might be interested in one of these as the sort of "upside down airplane stamp" of the Ars Magica book world.
All the ones that were in the warehouse have already been destroyed, so you'd have to get one of the defective copies already in circulation (maybe from cej1138 for example).