Million-dollar lawsuits have been lost because of a missing comma, so we know how expensive a typo can be.
A missing Oxford comma, in a 2017 suit against Oakhurst Dairy in Maine, caused enough ambiguity about overtime pay to result in a $5 million settlement in favour of delivery drivers, and that isn’t the only such case.
People have gone to prison over a typo.
In 1631, the English printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas omitted a three-letter word from a book. It cost them their licence and a £300 fine, a sum so crippling at the time that Barker spent the rest of his life in a debtor’s prison.
The book was a version of the Bible commissioned by King Charles I. It was nicknamed Wicked Bible after the printing error left out the word “not,” turning the seventh commandment into a scandalous exhortation: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The mistake was discovered after the first print run had been distributed. Copies were subsequently tracked down and burned. A few survive and are rare collectors’ items.
This, of course, was an extreme example. Errors caught after a print run were usually simply acknowledged, in what were called errata lists. And not all errors were seen as flaws.
The first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) includes a seven-page such list of over 200 mistakes, including dropped words, line breaks and mismatched punctuation. Joyce famously rejected some of these, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
That elegant phrase, Beauties of My Style, is now the title of an exhibition at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library (until November 29), that celebrates the idiosyncrasies, hidden stories and even poetry of errata lists.
The show is curated by art historian Rachel Churner, a professor of visual studies at The New School in New York, and Geoff Kaplan, a graphic designer and professor of design at Yale School of Art. Featured are mistakes acknowledged in novels, poems, religious texts, court documents, maps and legal testimonies.
In the first English translation of the Dutch nautical atlas The Mariners Mirrour (1588), for instance, cartographer Lucas Waghenaer blames the seas’ shifting nature for inaccuracies and begs the reader “not to carp” on such flaws. An 1846 map of the Hudson riverfront, used as a guide for steamboat travellers, acknowledges that the population of Fishkill Village in New York state isn’t an astronomical 11,000, but a mere 800.
“It was fascinating to learn what authors, printers, and readers at a given time deemed necessary to correct,” says Churner. “I love the dismissal of responsibility; sometimes the author wasn’t available and so, somehow, these mistakes ‘have happened’, all on their own. It’s as if they were meteorological events.”
ERROR APPARENT
In what is expected to be a big draw, the show features a copy of the Wicked Bible, drawn from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. A shaky “not” has been added by hand, in a tiny, hurried scrawl.
Also on display are instances in which errata were used as weapons to influence public opinion. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, amid the growing strictures of the Puritan and Protestant movements, for example, authors used errata to sneak statements of dissent past censors and dodge laws on crimes such as obscenity and treason.
In 1795, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge did this in his pamphlet titled Addresses to the People, which condemned England’s invasion of France. His mock-erratum reads: “Page 61, for MURDER read fight for the King and Country.”
In American author Upton Sinclair’s self-published first edition of 100%: The Story of a Patriot (1920), which satirised the hysteria around nationalism and communism in the wake of World War 1, Sinclair “mistakenly” identified Louis Fraina, a founding member of the Communist Party of America, as a government agent.
In Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, printed in 1543, an anonymous preface inserted by the publisher reframed his revolutionary heliocentric argument as mere “hypothesis”, in an attempt to appease censors and the church. And the tactic sort of worked. Despite its dramatic challenge to theology, the book wasn’t officially banned by the Roman Catholic Church until 1616 (after which it stayed on the Index of Forbidden Books for nearly 150 years, until 1758).
“We didn’t anticipate quite how much personality could be compressed into such a constrained format. The spare, standardised language can generate something genuinely beautiful too,” Churner says, “particularly when the transposition or omission produces a new word or meaning, such as ‘for on, read no’ or ‘for grave, read brave’.”
Today, in a world of real-time dissemination, AI plagiarism and autocorrect bloopers, the idea of the poetic, political, nuanced or even just the record-correcting errata seems almost quaint.
The sanctity of the written word, and the ideas of accuracy and accountability, are arguably more vital but less valued than they have ever been. There is no errata list that can fix that.
As the lie makes its way around the world, the truth has all too often stopped bothering to put its boots on. It usually lacks the infrastructure to keep up.
