Some Typographical Errors.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 230, 29 September 1888, Page 4 (Supplement)

Some Typographical Errors.

The number of curious typographical blunders which from time to time have bean committed is naturally very great. In most cases the errors have boon simply absurd, but in aomo instances they have been of such a nature as to be fraught with serious consequences to the perpetrators of them.

Shortly after ihe invention of pripting, the wife of a printer in Germany, whilst an edition of the Bible waa in the press, on one occasion made a small, bub important, change in the types. The sentence in Genesis in which it is declared that Eve shall be subject to her husband runs thus : 'He shall be thy lord ' (Herr). This was altered to 'He shall be thy fool' (Narr)^ Many copioa of the book got into circulation before the substitution of the one word for tho othor was discovered, for in blaok letter Herr and Narr much resombl« each other. It is said that the pracbical joke cost the unfortunate woman her life, she having been condemned to the stake by the ecclesiastical authorities.

During the/latter part of the last century an awkward mistake occurred in this country in printing the Bible. In this edition the word riot was omitted in the seventh commandment. For this piece of carelessness the then Archbishop of Canterbury imposed a heavy penalty. The edition, so far as pracbicable, was called in and destroyed, and a fine of £20,000 was inflicted upon the printers. The Roman Catholic Missal issued in France was once the Bubject of a ludicrous blunder. By the accidental substitution of a ■'v' for an 'a,' the word calotte {an ecclesiastical cap or mitre) was printed culotte (breeches). The'error occurred in the directions for conducting the service, and the sentence as altered read,' Here the priest will tako off his culotte.' Yet another illustration of the curious perversions sometimes made in the Scriptures by printers may be given. .The late Reverend William Jay once published a sermon preached by him on the text, ' Skin for akin, yea, all that a man hath will hegive for his life.'. The printer made the last word to read wife. Mr .Tay corrected the blunder in the firsib. and second proofs without the requisite alteration being attended to. When the author, received the last revise of the pamphlet, noticing that the prrbn^bus word still made its appearance, he wrote on the margin of the pagoi ' This idopgndp., upon circumßtances; change ybU'r ' wife 'into ' life.'' ! ; It occaeionally happens that in a printing office some of the, types will fall out of the forme,'and in replacing them mistakes are liable to bcour. In an odition of 'The Men of the Time,' part of a paragraph re: ferrihg to Robert Owen, the Parallelogram Communist, became disarranged, and the compositor, instead of reinserting the lines in their place, put them under the heading of 'Oxford, Bislipp of,' which was the nexb alphabetical reference. The result was that the article began thus :— 'OXFORD, the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of, was born in 1805. A more kind-hearted, truly benevolent man does not exist. A sceptic as regards religious belief, he is nevertheless/an out-and-out boliever iv spirit movetnonts. 1 Directly the mistake waa discovered the leaf was cancelled, but before this was done some copies of the book'had gob into circulation.

In Mr Pycroft's ' Ways and Words of Men of Letters,' there is given a conversation with a orinter. 'Really, 1 said the printer, ' gentlemen should nob place such unlimited confidence in the oyesighit of our hard-worked and half-blinded reader of proofs, for 1 am ashamed to say that we utterly ruined onevpoeb by a ludicrous misprint.' ' Indeed ! and what was the unhappy line?' 'Why, sir, the poet intended to say, ' See the pale martyr in a sheet of fire'; instead of which we made him say, '■ 'See the pale martyr with his shirt on ••fire."-.. ■::- , '" ;;; # . A frequent source of error is the snbstitiou of one letter, for another. Thus on one occasion the lino 'So the struck eagle strotchod upon the plain , appeared in print as ;\ ■ 'So the struck eagle stretched upon the plate' And in a poem in which the author had written : ■ : ' .' ; .-:. .':: .:■ , ■ ■;■...'. i For the dew-drop that falls on the freshiy- '',':;.;■ blownroseß,| ■:•■-:■.■. ;,"■!' ■■■ . :. '•'■■ the,_pr\njer, made him say: ' ; 'For the doW-drop that falls on the freshly" blownpOßes.' •■•■''.•'

f lk the case of. misprints of the character lof those above cited ~, the first impression of the reader who sees them would likely be that the mistakes must have been: intentional. But this conclusion is-not necessarily the correct one, for a compoeitbr seldom attempts to follow the sense of the i manuscript he is putting into type; Indeed, it is a proverb with printers that he who does this will never become a rapid workman. The idea is that it is the duty of a compositor to ' follow copy,' and that it is the! business of the proof-reader to correct errors. , ' "'; : '■■ - .

Sometimes, However, the printer will undertake to rectify a mistake into which he conceives the author has fallen, and not always with the happiest results. Thus a compositor, ignorant of the Greek mythology, came across the sentence, ' Shall reign the Hecate of the lowest hell.' This must be wrong, was bhe argumenb, for cat is not spelb with a final * c'; so the line was was changed to read, 'Shall reign the He cat of the lowest"hell.'—•Cornhill -Magazine.' ■ ;-'"; '■■ . '■•'.:';': •.: *J _ ■y::i''.":. -