Just My Typo: From "Sinning with the Choir" to "the Untied States" - Softcover
A charming collection of typographical errors, slips of the pen, and embarrassing misprints, Just My Typo celebrates the awful and the sublime mistakes that riddle our feeble human attempts at communication.
It's time to accept the truth: typos are everywhere. Legal documents are riddled with errors, headlines of respectable publications are rife with misspellings, and even your favorite books need a few reprints to get everything right. Isn't it time we learned to laugh at our mistakes instead of despairing? Just My Typo is an irresistible collection of the most humorous, mistakenly poignant, and downright awful typos in texts, from the Bible to insurance advertisements to political slogans.
Within these pages, you’ll travel back in time with great figures from history, such as Sir Francis Drake (who circumcised the world in a small ship) and Rambo (the famous French poet). You’ll also find valuable moral instruction (“Blessed are the meek, for they shall irrigate the earth.”), and meet politicians who exploit disasters to boost their pubic profiles. Structured according to categories (such as, “To Be or To Be: Typos in Literature”), you’ll easily find either a quick laugh or a relaxing—and cringe-inducing—read. A few more of the gems within:
· “The Queen pissed graciously over the Menai Bridge.”
· “I am certain of one thing. Whatever may come between us—and wherever he may be on earth—Arthur will always remember that I love ham.” (The Parting, Millicent Hemming)
· “Love is just a passing fanny.”
Editors, proofreaders, and writers everywhere pull their hair out trying to eliminate mistakes, to no avail. Celebrating the humanity of our errors and the timelessness of mistakes, Just My Typo is essential reading for anyone who values the power and peril of the written word.
It's time to accept the truth: typos are everywhere. Legal documents are riddled with errors, headlines of respectable publications are rife with misspellings, and even your favorite books need a few reprints to get everything right. Isn't it time we learned to laugh at our mistakes instead of despairing? Just My Typo is an irresistible collection of the most humorous, mistakenly poignant, and downright awful typos in texts, from the Bible to insurance advertisements to political slogans.
Within these pages, you’ll travel back in time with great figures from history, such as Sir Francis Drake (who circumcised the world in a small ship) and Rambo (the famous French poet). You’ll also find valuable moral instruction (“Blessed are the meek, for they shall irrigate the earth.”), and meet politicians who exploit disasters to boost their pubic profiles. Structured according to categories (such as, “To Be or To Be: Typos in Literature”), you’ll easily find either a quick laugh or a relaxing—and cringe-inducing—read. A few more of the gems within:
· “The Queen pissed graciously over the Menai Bridge.”
· “I am certain of one thing. Whatever may come between us—and wherever he may be on earth—Arthur will always remember that I love ham.” (The Parting, Millicent Hemming)
· “Love is just a passing fanny.”
Editors, proofreaders, and writers everywhere pull their hair out trying to eliminate mistakes, to no avail. Celebrating the humanity of our errors and the timelessness of mistakes, Just My Typo is essential reading for anyone who values the power and peril of the written word.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Drummond Moir grew up in Edinburgh and studied at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and Daiichi Keizai University in Fukuoka, Japan. Now based in London, he is Editorial Director of Sceptre, one of the UK’s leading literary imprints.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
To Be or To Be
Typos in Literature
The title of this chapter, “To Be or To Be,” a bastardization of one of the most famous sentences in the English language, comes from a new edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet published some years ago. Six professional proofreaders failed to catch the mistake, which received national publicity.
I am certain of one thing. Whatever may come between us—and wherever he may be on earth—Arthur will always remember that I love ham.
The Parting, Millicent Hemming
My love she’s handsome, my love she’s boney.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
‘Barney’, by Rudge—$1.50
New York publisher’s advertisement for Charles Dickens’s fifth novel, late nineteenth century
After being moved to tears by the sheer scale of CERN’s particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, Richard Dawkins attempted to express his awe in his new book. But in what he described as “an unfortunate misprint,” the object of his affection came out as “The Large Hardon Collider.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Catriona McPherson, novelist
“I once found the following typo while editing one of my Dandy Gilver mysteries. The context is that Dandy (a respectable, gently born sleuth from the 1920s) hears the door of an adjacent room slam. I meant to have ‘I opened my own a crack and put my eye to it’ . . . only I’d missed out the word ‘a.’ I’m ashamed to tell you how long I laughed for.”
He was disfigured. As long as I can remember, he has had a car on his face.
Short story
Ted could not raise the cash necessary to purchase a house, and eventually in desperation he had to burrow.
The Price of Love, Rosemary Jeans
The poet Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) once wrote a lovely elegy for a soldier who lay dead in a distant war. The poem depicted a family dreaming of the homecoming of their soldier, while “All night he lies beneath the stars / And dreams no more out there.” When the Irish Times printed the poem, it became “All night he lies beneath the stairs . . .”
He could see hills on the horizon. The hills were dark yellow and black. Past the hills, he guessed, was the dessert.
2666, Roberto Bolaño
He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground.
Baby, I’m Yours, Susan Andersen
The doctor smiled reassuringly at the worried mother and patted her little bot on the cheek.
Prescription for Love, Josephine Lawrence
Later that same evening after a vain search all around the village, Mary found the dog dead in the garden. She curried the body indoors.
Life in Barnsthorpe, Patricia Cox
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Erica Wagner, literary editor, The Times, London
“When I first came to The Times, sixteen years ago (!), our reviewers would post in their copy, or, if they were really technologically advanced, fax it. I would then write a catchline on top of the piece and put it in a tray to go down to the copytakers, who would swiftly and efficiently type it into our creaky Atex system. Peter Ackroyd reviewed a biography of George Bernard Shaw for me in those olden days, in which he referred to GBS as ‘the man in the Jaeger suit.’ It came back from the copytakers as ‘the man in the jaguar suit’—an image of GBS I have always loved.”
Toward the end of Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White Jacket, an account of a sailor’s fall into the sea includes the following passage: “But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea.” In the early 1920s, when the Standard Edition of Melville’s works was first published in London, a typesetter hit the wrong key and “coiled fish” became “soiled fish.” Two decades later, a noted Harvard literary critic (whom I’m not going to name) analyzed the passage in a published work about the golden era of American literature. Unaware that “soiled” was a misprint, he praised the passage as “a twist of imagery of the sort that would become peculiarly Melville’s,” going on to assert, rather gushingly, that “hardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some ‘soiled fish of the sea.’ ”
Harry detached himself from the body and stepped across the concrete floor to a bunker door he had noticed. With his lighter lit he was a target; with more light everyone was a target. He held the MP5 at the ready while fucking the switch with his left hand.
Unedited draft of Jo Nesbø’s Phantom
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Anonymous editor
“A medical book I worked on had a disclaimer saying the publisher and author are responsible for any consequences that may arise from following the advice set forth within these pages. It should have said, of course: the publisher and author are NOT responsible.”
From his left ear to the corner of his mouth ran a long scar, the result of a duet many years before.
Flight from Germany, William le Queux
POETS’ CORNER
Typos in literature are nothing new. Geoffrey Chaucer was so enraged by one of his fourteenth-century scribes, Adam Pinkhurst, that he wrote a poem to name and shame him. The verse ends:
So oft a day I must thy work renew,
It to correct, and eke to rub and scrape;
And all is through thy negligence and rape.
Others too have suffered at the pen of an irate poet. In the early nineteenth century, Irishman Thomas Moore composed the following lines about the incompetence of English printers:
But ’tis dreadful to think what provoking mistakes
The vile country press in one’s prosody makes.
For you know, dear,—I may, without vanity, hint—
Though an angel should write, still ’tis devils must print;
And you can’t think what havoc these demons sometimes
Choose to make of one’s sense, and, what’s worse, of one’s rhymes.
But a week or two since, in my Ode upon Spring,
Which I meant to have made a most beautiful thing,
Where I talk’d of the “dewdrops from freshly-blown roses,”
The nasty things made it “from freshly blown noses”!
The Fudges in England, 1835
Page 140. In line 10 of “Night Arrival of Sea-Trout”, for “rape,” read “nape.”
Erratum slip from Ted Hughes’s 1979 collection Moortown
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Alan Titchmarsh
“When employed as a gardening books editor some years ago, I was proofreading an entry in a gardening encyclopedia for pulmonaria, the lungwort, whose leaves are attractively spotted with white. It was only by sheer good fortune that I noticed the entry read:
‘Pulmonaria, the lungwort, whose leaves are attractively spotted with shite.’ ”
5 Sept. 2002—In a report of the commemoration of Wordsworth’s poem “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” page 12, yesterday, we insinuated a Guardian apostrophe so that the view from the bridge became, “A sight so touching in it’s majesty.”
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
14 Sept. 2002—A correction, page 25, September 5, was contentious. It corrected the punctuation in a line from Wordsworth’s poem “Westminster Bridge,” which had appeared in a report in the Guardian the previous day as: “A sight so touching in it’s majesty.” In fact the punctuation follows the 1807 edition and the apostrophe has been retained in all anniversary editions.
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Nigel Wilcockson, publisher
“My two favorites are the fifties recipe book that included the following instruction about soufflés: ‘Try to avoid peeing in to the oven, as this will impair the flavor’; and the unfortunate fairy-tale book that had a series of running heads reading ‘The Four Fairy Queers.’ ”
When eminent British publisher Secker & Warburg merged with The Harvill Press in 2005, the trade announcement featured a long list of illustrious writers who’d been published down the decades by two of the great London literary lists, including George Orwell, Umberto Eco, Boris Pasternak, and one “Frank Kafka.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Andrew Steeds, Simply Put Communication Consultancy
“One major publisher I’ve worked with once gave me a wonderful example of the dangers of global search and replace. An author, having submitted his Young Adult novel, decided at the last minute that he wanted to change the name of the protagonist from David to Sam (I think his wife had just given birth to their first son, whose name this was). No problem, said the publishers, we’ll do a search and replace: we can manage it, even if it’s near final proof stage.
What they failed to remember was that the protagonist was an A-level student, studying History of Art, who travels to Florence with his school as part of his course. Cue brilliant moment when he and his group sit in rapt wonder staring up at Michelangelo’s glorious sculpture . . .”
2 Nov. 1999—In wishing the actor Juliet Stevenson happy 43rd birthday on Saturday, page 24, October 30, we listed among her hits The Duchess of Mali. This was inadvertent discrimination against John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Judith Flanders, author and journalist
“Once, at Penguin, I passed a cover proof (yup, shame on me, I passed it) for Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Carlo (well, everything was spelled correctly!).”
Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses is one of the most ambitious, influential, and notoriously difficult novels ever written. From an editorial point of view it is also one of the most fascinating, since the original was riddled with hundreds of errors necessitating numerous new editions, all seeking to be the definitive version. The late Dr. Jack Dalton, a Joycean scholar, shocked devotees in 1961 by pointing out that some of the mistakes in the original Ulysses were plain old typos. “Bread,” for example, is printed as “beard” in the 1922 text. Because the 265,000-word stream of consciousness novel was so challenging, leaving most readers baffled by its experimental prose, the errors went largely unnoticed, or at least unremarked, for forty years after publication. Joyce himself simply didn’t have time to correct every single error he found in the first proofs, complaining in a letter just three months before publication: “Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel, I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Michelle Howry, senior editor, Simon & Schuster
“I was working on a book with a noted psychic/spiritualist. The book was meant to ‘draw back the curtain’ to reveal the hidden world of psychics and soothsayers, and to give you tips for telling the honest and spiritually gifted mediums from the charlatans. We put together the bound galley for the book—an early set of uncorrected typeset pages that we send out to the media so they can write about it in magazines and newspapers. The galleys were sent far and wide, and it was only after they were in the mail and out the door that an eagle-eyed assistant looked at the spine copy:
THE TRUTH ABOUT PHYSICS
Anyone picking up that book hoping to learn the finer points of quantum theory would be sorely disappointed.”
Plot is important, but the manner of preventing it is still m re important.
Writers’ Magazine
INTERLUDE
The Perils of the Oxycretin!
While oxymorons are figures of speech in which contradictory terms combine in a single phrase (living dead, open secret, same difference, old news, etc.), oxycretins are two opposite words that can be housed within the same word. By removing a single letter, the whole word switches to the opposite meaning—the typographical equivalent to striding obliviously toward an undetonated bomb. The slightest slip of the pen can make all the difference:
One survived.
None survived.
*
Don’t be absurd, my mother-in-law is entirely harmless.
Don’t be absurd, my mother-in-law is entirely charmless.
*
Is there anything more lovely than the laughter of children?
Is there anything more lovely than the slaughter of children?
INTERLUDE
*
Covert offensive: the last thing our enemy will be expecting!
Overt offensive: the last thing our enemy will be expecting!
*
The newly crowned Queen declared immediately that she would reign in style.
The newly crowned Queen declared immediately that she would resign in style.
Lastly, witness the following correction printed in the Guardian:
Owing to a typographical error Thursday’s article referred to the Soviet formula which recognised the “futility” of nuclear war. This should have read “utility.”
2
The Fourth Mistake
Typos in the Media
The Victorian newspaper the London Globe once made the following correction: “Our printer yesterday committed a serious error in giving our extract from the registrar-general’s return. He makes us say that the inhabitants of London suffer at present from a high rate of morality.”
The Queen herself graciously pissed over the magnificent edifice
The Times reporting Queen Victoria’s opening of the Menai Bridge
REPORT: ARMSTRONG USED RUGS
CBC News caption in wake of Lance Armstrong’s admission to Oprah Winfrey that he used illegal substances
Three hundred thousand Freshmen will enter American institutions of higher yearning next fall.
Princeton Seminary Bulletin
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Simon Heffer, journalist and author of Strictly English
“I seem to recall that when Violet, the mother of the Kray twins, died and they were let out for the day to attend her funeral, one newspaper described her obsequies as being those of ‘Mrs Violent Kray.’ ”
Successful businesswoman, widower, aged 44, usual trappings, non-smoker with varied interests, seeks affectionate, understanding female to shave the enjoyable things in life.
Yorkshire Post
Timeless headline from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2011
Before the verdict was rendered this morning “Miss Mexico” told interviewers that if the court freed her, she would become a nut.
Chicago Daily Tribune
BISHOPS AGREE SEX ABUSE RULES
Sunday Business Post
WHEN TYPESETTERS LOSE IT—NO. 53
On the other hand, Miss Wethered played steadolly bm bm bm bm bm.
New York Morning Telegraph
“They have been suggesting that for some time. It’s all rubbish. It’s fiction.” His comments followed claims that the Prince has been secretly Mrs. Parker-Bowles for more than a decade, and as often as once a week.
Evening Gazette
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Nicole, literary agent
“My first job out of college was in the advertising department at Popular Photography magazine, which we called ‘Pop’ for short. I once e-mailed a client the following: ‘Dear [Client], This e-mail is to confirm your insertion in Poop for the December issue. All best, Nicole’ ”
ONE CAN ARGUE THAT THE PRESIDENT IS USING THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS TO BOOST HIS PUBIC PROFILE
Christian Science Monitor on George Bush
And a Nightingale Sang (ITV) was like a stretched Hovis ad with some real acting. Set in Newcastle during the war, it had a bravura performance by Phyllis Logan as Helen, a lovely innocent lass who falls for squaddie (Tom Watt) whose compassionate manner conceals a belief that love is ultimately just a passing fanny.
To Be or To Be
Typos in Literature
The title of this chapter, “To Be or To Be,” a bastardization of one of the most famous sentences in the English language, comes from a new edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet published some years ago. Six professional proofreaders failed to catch the mistake, which received national publicity.
I am certain of one thing. Whatever may come between us—and wherever he may be on earth—Arthur will always remember that I love ham.
The Parting, Millicent Hemming
My love she’s handsome, my love she’s boney.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
‘Barney’, by Rudge—$1.50
New York publisher’s advertisement for Charles Dickens’s fifth novel, late nineteenth century
After being moved to tears by the sheer scale of CERN’s particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, Richard Dawkins attempted to express his awe in his new book. But in what he described as “an unfortunate misprint,” the object of his affection came out as “The Large Hardon Collider.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Catriona McPherson, novelist
“I once found the following typo while editing one of my Dandy Gilver mysteries. The context is that Dandy (a respectable, gently born sleuth from the 1920s) hears the door of an adjacent room slam. I meant to have ‘I opened my own a crack and put my eye to it’ . . . only I’d missed out the word ‘a.’ I’m ashamed to tell you how long I laughed for.”
He was disfigured. As long as I can remember, he has had a car on his face.
Short story
Ted could not raise the cash necessary to purchase a house, and eventually in desperation he had to burrow.
The Price of Love, Rosemary Jeans
The poet Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) once wrote a lovely elegy for a soldier who lay dead in a distant war. The poem depicted a family dreaming of the homecoming of their soldier, while “All night he lies beneath the stars / And dreams no more out there.” When the Irish Times printed the poem, it became “All night he lies beneath the stairs . . .”
He could see hills on the horizon. The hills were dark yellow and black. Past the hills, he guessed, was the dessert.
2666, Roberto Bolaño
He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground.
Baby, I’m Yours, Susan Andersen
The doctor smiled reassuringly at the worried mother and patted her little bot on the cheek.
Prescription for Love, Josephine Lawrence
Later that same evening after a vain search all around the village, Mary found the dog dead in the garden. She curried the body indoors.
Life in Barnsthorpe, Patricia Cox
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Erica Wagner, literary editor, The Times, London
“When I first came to The Times, sixteen years ago (!), our reviewers would post in their copy, or, if they were really technologically advanced, fax it. I would then write a catchline on top of the piece and put it in a tray to go down to the copytakers, who would swiftly and efficiently type it into our creaky Atex system. Peter Ackroyd reviewed a biography of George Bernard Shaw for me in those olden days, in which he referred to GBS as ‘the man in the Jaeger suit.’ It came back from the copytakers as ‘the man in the jaguar suit’—an image of GBS I have always loved.”
Toward the end of Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White Jacket, an account of a sailor’s fall into the sea includes the following passage: “But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea.” In the early 1920s, when the Standard Edition of Melville’s works was first published in London, a typesetter hit the wrong key and “coiled fish” became “soiled fish.” Two decades later, a noted Harvard literary critic (whom I’m not going to name) analyzed the passage in a published work about the golden era of American literature. Unaware that “soiled” was a misprint, he praised the passage as “a twist of imagery of the sort that would become peculiarly Melville’s,” going on to assert, rather gushingly, that “hardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some ‘soiled fish of the sea.’ ”
Harry detached himself from the body and stepped across the concrete floor to a bunker door he had noticed. With his lighter lit he was a target; with more light everyone was a target. He held the MP5 at the ready while fucking the switch with his left hand.
Unedited draft of Jo Nesbø’s Phantom
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Anonymous editor
“A medical book I worked on had a disclaimer saying the publisher and author are responsible for any consequences that may arise from following the advice set forth within these pages. It should have said, of course: the publisher and author are NOT responsible.”
From his left ear to the corner of his mouth ran a long scar, the result of a duet many years before.
Flight from Germany, William le Queux
POETS’ CORNER
Typos in literature are nothing new. Geoffrey Chaucer was so enraged by one of his fourteenth-century scribes, Adam Pinkhurst, that he wrote a poem to name and shame him. The verse ends:
So oft a day I must thy work renew,
It to correct, and eke to rub and scrape;
And all is through thy negligence and rape.
Others too have suffered at the pen of an irate poet. In the early nineteenth century, Irishman Thomas Moore composed the following lines about the incompetence of English printers:
But ’tis dreadful to think what provoking mistakes
The vile country press in one’s prosody makes.
For you know, dear,—I may, without vanity, hint—
Though an angel should write, still ’tis devils must print;
And you can’t think what havoc these demons sometimes
Choose to make of one’s sense, and, what’s worse, of one’s rhymes.
But a week or two since, in my Ode upon Spring,
Which I meant to have made a most beautiful thing,
Where I talk’d of the “dewdrops from freshly-blown roses,”
The nasty things made it “from freshly blown noses”!
The Fudges in England, 1835
Page 140. In line 10 of “Night Arrival of Sea-Trout”, for “rape,” read “nape.”
Erratum slip from Ted Hughes’s 1979 collection Moortown
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Alan Titchmarsh
“When employed as a gardening books editor some years ago, I was proofreading an entry in a gardening encyclopedia for pulmonaria, the lungwort, whose leaves are attractively spotted with white. It was only by sheer good fortune that I noticed the entry read:
‘Pulmonaria, the lungwort, whose leaves are attractively spotted with shite.’ ”
5 Sept. 2002—In a report of the commemoration of Wordsworth’s poem “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” page 12, yesterday, we insinuated a Guardian apostrophe so that the view from the bridge became, “A sight so touching in it’s majesty.”
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
14 Sept. 2002—A correction, page 25, September 5, was contentious. It corrected the punctuation in a line from Wordsworth’s poem “Westminster Bridge,” which had appeared in a report in the Guardian the previous day as: “A sight so touching in it’s majesty.” In fact the punctuation follows the 1807 edition and the apostrophe has been retained in all anniversary editions.
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Nigel Wilcockson, publisher
“My two favorites are the fifties recipe book that included the following instruction about soufflés: ‘Try to avoid peeing in to the oven, as this will impair the flavor’; and the unfortunate fairy-tale book that had a series of running heads reading ‘The Four Fairy Queers.’ ”
When eminent British publisher Secker & Warburg merged with The Harvill Press in 2005, the trade announcement featured a long list of illustrious writers who’d been published down the decades by two of the great London literary lists, including George Orwell, Umberto Eco, Boris Pasternak, and one “Frank Kafka.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Andrew Steeds, Simply Put Communication Consultancy
“One major publisher I’ve worked with once gave me a wonderful example of the dangers of global search and replace. An author, having submitted his Young Adult novel, decided at the last minute that he wanted to change the name of the protagonist from David to Sam (I think his wife had just given birth to their first son, whose name this was). No problem, said the publishers, we’ll do a search and replace: we can manage it, even if it’s near final proof stage.
What they failed to remember was that the protagonist was an A-level student, studying History of Art, who travels to Florence with his school as part of his course. Cue brilliant moment when he and his group sit in rapt wonder staring up at Michelangelo’s glorious sculpture . . .”
2 Nov. 1999—In wishing the actor Juliet Stevenson happy 43rd birthday on Saturday, page 24, October 30, we listed among her hits The Duchess of Mali. This was inadvertent discrimination against John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.
Guardian Corrections and Clarifications
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Judith Flanders, author and journalist
“Once, at Penguin, I passed a cover proof (yup, shame on me, I passed it) for Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Carlo (well, everything was spelled correctly!).”
Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses is one of the most ambitious, influential, and notoriously difficult novels ever written. From an editorial point of view it is also one of the most fascinating, since the original was riddled with hundreds of errors necessitating numerous new editions, all seeking to be the definitive version. The late Dr. Jack Dalton, a Joycean scholar, shocked devotees in 1961 by pointing out that some of the mistakes in the original Ulysses were plain old typos. “Bread,” for example, is printed as “beard” in the 1922 text. Because the 265,000-word stream of consciousness novel was so challenging, leaving most readers baffled by its experimental prose, the errors went largely unnoticed, or at least unremarked, for forty years after publication. Joyce himself simply didn’t have time to correct every single error he found in the first proofs, complaining in a letter just three months before publication: “Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel, I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half.”
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Michelle Howry, senior editor, Simon & Schuster
“I was working on a book with a noted psychic/spiritualist. The book was meant to ‘draw back the curtain’ to reveal the hidden world of psychics and soothsayers, and to give you tips for telling the honest and spiritually gifted mediums from the charlatans. We put together the bound galley for the book—an early set of uncorrected typeset pages that we send out to the media so they can write about it in magazines and newspapers. The galleys were sent far and wide, and it was only after they were in the mail and out the door that an eagle-eyed assistant looked at the spine copy:
THE TRUTH ABOUT PHYSICS
Anyone picking up that book hoping to learn the finer points of quantum theory would be sorely disappointed.”
Plot is important, but the manner of preventing it is still m re important.
Writers’ Magazine
INTERLUDE
The Perils of the Oxycretin!
While oxymorons are figures of speech in which contradictory terms combine in a single phrase (living dead, open secret, same difference, old news, etc.), oxycretins are two opposite words that can be housed within the same word. By removing a single letter, the whole word switches to the opposite meaning—the typographical equivalent to striding obliviously toward an undetonated bomb. The slightest slip of the pen can make all the difference:
One survived.
None survived.
*
Don’t be absurd, my mother-in-law is entirely harmless.
Don’t be absurd, my mother-in-law is entirely charmless.
*
Is there anything more lovely than the laughter of children?
Is there anything more lovely than the slaughter of children?
INTERLUDE
*
Covert offensive: the last thing our enemy will be expecting!
Overt offensive: the last thing our enemy will be expecting!
*
The newly crowned Queen declared immediately that she would reign in style.
The newly crowned Queen declared immediately that she would resign in style.
Lastly, witness the following correction printed in the Guardian:
Owing to a typographical error Thursday’s article referred to the Soviet formula which recognised the “futility” of nuclear war. This should have read “utility.”
2
The Fourth Mistake
Typos in the Media
The Victorian newspaper the London Globe once made the following correction: “Our printer yesterday committed a serious error in giving our extract from the registrar-general’s return. He makes us say that the inhabitants of London suffer at present from a high rate of morality.”
The Queen herself graciously pissed over the magnificent edifice
The Times reporting Queen Victoria’s opening of the Menai Bridge
REPORT: ARMSTRONG USED RUGS
CBC News caption in wake of Lance Armstrong’s admission to Oprah Winfrey that he used illegal substances
Three hundred thousand Freshmen will enter American institutions of higher yearning next fall.
Princeton Seminary Bulletin
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Simon Heffer, journalist and author of Strictly English
“I seem to recall that when Violet, the mother of the Kray twins, died and they were let out for the day to attend her funeral, one newspaper described her obsequies as being those of ‘Mrs Violent Kray.’ ”
Successful businesswoman, widower, aged 44, usual trappings, non-smoker with varied interests, seeks affectionate, understanding female to shave the enjoyable things in life.
Yorkshire Post
Timeless headline from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2011
Before the verdict was rendered this morning “Miss Mexico” told interviewers that if the court freed her, she would become a nut.
Chicago Daily Tribune
BISHOPS AGREE SEX ABUSE RULES
Sunday Business Post
WHEN TYPESETTERS LOSE IT—NO. 53
On the other hand, Miss Wethered played steadolly bm bm bm bm bm.
New York Morning Telegraph
“They have been suggesting that for some time. It’s all rubbish. It’s fiction.” His comments followed claims that the Prince has been secretly Mrs. Parker-Bowles for more than a decade, and as often as once a week.
Evening Gazette
MY FAVORITE TYPO
Nicole, literary agent
“My first job out of college was in the advertising department at Popular Photography magazine, which we called ‘Pop’ for short. I once e-mailed a client the following: ‘Dear [Client], This e-mail is to confirm your insertion in Poop for the December issue. All best, Nicole’ ”
ONE CAN ARGUE THAT THE PRESIDENT IS USING THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS TO BOOST HIS PUBIC PROFILE
Christian Science Monitor on George Bush
And a Nightingale Sang (ITV) was like a stretched Hovis ad with some real acting. Set in Newcastle during the war, it had a bravura performance by Phyllis Logan as Helen, a lovely innocent lass who falls for squaddie (Tom Watt) whose compassionate manner conceals a belief that love is ultimately just a passing fanny.
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- PublisherCrown
- Publication date2014
- ISBN 10 0385346603
- ISBN 13 9780385346603
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages192
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