[Grammar] Verbs and their objects

[Englishman]

A literary review by a respected British journalist and obituary writer of an official biography of Britain's Queen Mother and published yesterday in London's main evening newspaper, began with this paragraph:

The threat facing all royal biographers is that they will end up producing not so much a book as constructing a literary mausoleum.

I'm not impressed. The above sentence appears to have a fundamental flaw. Either one word should be moved or another deleted. Does anyone else agree? Can you explain what is wrong?

[konungursvia]

I agree it's poorly constructed. After 'producing not so much' + a noun, we expect a comma and another noun. Using not so much as a partitive after producing requires this. Changing the gerund to 'producing' at this point destroys the dichotomy set up.

[Englishman]

Thanks for that reply.

If I'd been writing/editing that passage it would have read:

The threat facing all royal biographers is that they will end up producing not so much a book as constructing a literary mausoleum.

OR

The threat facing all royal biographers is that they will end up producing not so much producing a book as constructing a literary mausoleum.

[konungursvia]

Exactly what I would have written, either the former or the latter, not what they had. Lousy editing, if you ask me.