BIBLE MISPRINTS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 10, 11 March 1893, Page 221

BIBLE MISPRINTS.

SOME QUEER BLUNDERS MADE BY TYPESETTERS.

In no work that has been printed since the invention of the art has there been so many misprints perpetrated as in the Bible.

Pope Sextus V. caused an edition of the 'Vulgate’ to be published in Rome in 1500, every pi oof of which he had carefully corrected himself, and at the end of the volume he affixed a bull by which he excommunicated any one who should attempt to make an alteration in the text. This book caused a great deal of amazement —for the Bible was fouud to be full of mistakes —and the Pope, in consequence, was obliged to suppress the edition. A copy of it is a great rarity, and, of course, fetches a high price. Brunet, in his Manuel du Librarie, says that a very large paper copy was disposed of at the sale of Cadmus de Limaie for 1,210 francs. The Engish Bible contains some very remarkable misprints. In the edition of 1634, at the twelfth Psalm, ‘The fool hath said in his heart there is God,’ instead of ‘there is no God.’ This edition was suppressed by order of the King. In another London edition (quarto 1653) we read : • In order that all the woild shall perceive the means of arriving at worldly riches,’ instead of ‘ godly riches.’ Even the edition of Field, who was printer to the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth century, is full of misprints. It is said he received a present of £1,500 from the Independents to print ‘ye ’ for ‘ we ’ in the sixth verse of the third chapter of Acts, in order to make it appear that the right of choosing their pastors emanated from the people and not from the Apostles: ‘Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of Holy Ghost and of wisdom whom ye [wej may appoint over this business.’ In the same Bible, in Corinthians (1. vi., 9), we find, ‘ Know ye not that the unrighteous shall [not] inherit the Kingdom of God.’ At the Clarendon Press, in 1617, a Bible was piinted which was known as the ‘ Vinegar Bible,’ on account of the title of the twentieth chapter of St. Luke, in which the ‘ Parable of the Vineyard’ is printed the ‘Parable of the Vinegar.’ To show how dangerous it is to assert infallibility while correcting the press, it may be mentioned that in the ‘ Curiosities Bibliographiques,’ published at Paris in 1847, and from which I have denved several of these misprints, the word ‘ vinegar ’ is piinted • vineyard.’ The omission of the negative has occurred more than once in printing the seventh commandment. This happened in the edition published in the reign of Charles 1., and for it the printers were summoned before the High Commission and fined £3,000. The same omission was observed in the thirty fourth edition of the Bible, printed at Halle, which was confiscated, and is now a great biblical rarity. Ail scriptural misprints are not, as we have seen in the case of Field, the lesult of accident. There is another on iecord which betrays a deep and, I may add, a most nefarious design. It was the design of the printer’s widow in Get many to upset the whole system of domestic economy. A new edition of the Bible was being printed in her house, and one night, when all the woikmen were absent, she arose from her comfortless bed (a German bed is never anything else but comfortless) and proceeded to the printingroom, there to tamper with the type and falsify a text that had caused her much trouble. Her defunct better half (?) hail, without doubt, given her fiequent cause to protest in her heart against that sentence of woman’s subjection which is pronounced upon Eve in the third chapter of Genesis. To rescue her sex from its false position she resolved toal ter the relative si tuationsof the parties, and, taking out the first two letters of the word ‘herr,’ cunningly replaced them by ‘ na.’ By this means the decree ran : ‘And he shall be thy (narr) fool,’ instead of he shall be thy (herr) lord,’ This substitution, though submitted to in domestic life—as, perhaps, was the case—was not suffered to pass by those who were in authoiity without punishment, and the widow was burned for heresy. Some copies of this edition are said to have been secieted, aid are possibly to be found in the private libraries of a few s.rong-miuded women.