American Gods - Agrammatic question

[Haru]

So I recently picked up Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', and while I enjoy it, there was something odd in there I hadn't seen anywhere else, and I wanted to ask you what this was.

Every sentence that starts with 'A', as in "A car was driving by" or "A week ago the rain began to fall", there is no space between the 'A' and the following word. In the book, the sentences are "Acar was driving by" and "Aweek ago the rain began to fall". Now the first time I read that, I thought it was a typo, honest mistake, happens to the best of us. But I'm now two thirds through the book and every single time a sentence began like that, it was missing the space. No exception.

Now is this some sort of special grammar question where you are allowed to write like that, but it isn't necessary? Or is it simply a mistake and nobody caught it? Seems unlikely.

[LizW65]

Huh, that doesn't happen in my copy.

Are you reading an e-book edition? E-books typically are scanned rather than typeset and many have odd spelling and/or grammatical errors as a result; for instance one I was recently reading referenced a family named Allen, and kept referring to them as the Aliens (when Allen was singular it was spelled correctly, so I was able to figure out from the context what the hell was going on, but it still looked odd, especially as the story was set in the 16th century and was fantasy rather than sci-fi.)

[Shecky]

There's also the formatting to take into consideration; some formats change stuff when you import it.

[Haru]

Nope, dead tree edition. But I conclude that this is not something that's supposed to be. Weird.

Well, it is an edited version, "the Author's preferred text" they call it. Still, I don't think something like this should happen.

[Quantus]

Nope, that definitely sounds like an error in that particular edition