Behold! For I Am A Grammar Snob!

So, I picked up this book from work (the local library -- find yours and support it!) the other day with high hopes. I've been on a big ol' non-fiction kick lately because I love learning about stuff I never learned in school (stupid "college track" high school education meant that World History wasn't on the course list). I knew that Charlemagne existed and was pretty cool and unified ... um, places that were disparate (?) and was a Holy Roman Emperor. That is all I knew.

I started reading the book and the first thing I saw was a selected genealogy of Charlemagne's family. Nothing I like better than a good genealogy (seriously, it's my other hobby), so the book was looking good. The next thing I saw was a time line of the rise and fall of the Carolingian (Charlemagne's) Empire, with a column for what was going on in France, the Byzantine Empire, Western Christendom, and the Islamic World. Very awesome--I really like knowing what was going on elsewhere outside of the main story. This is something else that was never really covered in school -- the fact that history is a bunch of interrelated stories and that the Western world did not exist in isolation.

Then, on page 1 of the Introduction, catastrophe befell my reading. The author wrote "They and myriads of other Europeans..." Myriads of other. No. No, my friend, this is not correct. The word myriad is like the word many, in that it doesn't get pluralized. It also doesn't get a preposition tacked on the end of it. It should have read "They and myriad other Europeans..."

And now, I don't know if I can finish the book. I read that sentence and became disgusted with the author (about whom [look! proper grammer used pompously to show that I know how to use it!] I know little, except that he has written many [not manys!] historical biographies and books about, well, stuff we didn't learn in school) and haven't read any further.

Which is a shame, because it looks like the book could be quite good. Perhaps I should abandon my high moral grammar horse and just enjoy the book? Does anyone else have issues like this when they read? Am I the only over-principled reader?