Some Typographical Errors.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 303, 29 September 1888, Page 5

Some Typographical Errors.

r THE number v* of > ! ;curio'us - blunders. r which from time , to; time 'Have "' been committed is naturally very erreat. In' i most cases' the errors have ' been • simply^ I absurd, but in some instances they^ have been of such a nature as to be fraught with" serious consequences to the perpetrators of.* ithem: ' - .'-'"*!. Shortly aftor the invention of' printing, the wife of a printer in Germany, whilst an edition of the Bible was in the press, on one occasion made a small, but, important, change in, the types. The sentence in 'Genesis in which it is declared that Eve shall be subject to her husband runs thus :J: J •He shall be thy lord ' (Herr). This wW altered, to 'He shall be thy fool' (Narr).Many copies of the" book got into circulation before the substitution of the one word *for the other was discovered, for in black letter Herr and Narr much resemble each, other. It is said that the • practical joke cost the Unfortunate woman her^ life, she having been condemned to the stake by the ecclesiastical, au fch ori ties. During the latter part of the last century an awkward mistake occurred in this country in printing the Bible. In this edition the word not 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 practicable, was called in arid destroyed, and a fine of £20,000 was inflicted upon the printers. The Roman Catholic Missal issued in' France was once the subject of a ludicrous blunder. By the accidental substitution of a 'n' 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 take 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 skin, yea, all thab a man hath will he give for his life.' The printer made the last word to read wife. Mr Jay corrected the blunder in the first and second proofs without the requisite alteration being attended to. When the author received the last revise of the pamphlet, noticing that the erroneous word still made its appearance, he wrote on the margin of the page, ' This depends altogether upon circumstances ; change your ' wife ' into • life.' ' It occasionally happens that in a printing office some of the types will fall out of the forme, and in replacing them mistakes are liable to occur. In an edition of 'The Men of the Time,' part of a paragraph referring to Robert Owen, the Parallelpgram Communist, became disarranged, and the compositor, instead of reinserting the lines in their place, put them under the heading of 'Oxford, Bishop of,' which was the next 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 believer in spirit movements.' Directly the mistake was 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 printer. 'Really,' said the printer, ' gentlemen should not place such ' unlimited confidence in the eyesight of our hard-worked and half-blinded reader of proofs, for I am ashamed to say that we utterly ruined one poet by a ludicrous misprint.' 'Indeed! and whab was the unhappy line ?' c 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 substition of one letter for another. Thus on one occasion the line 'So the struck eagle stretched 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 : 'For the dew-drop that falls on the freshlyblown roses,' the printer made him say : 'For the de,v-drop that falls on the freshly' blown noses.' In the case of misprints of the character of those above cited, the first impression of the reader who sees 6hem would likely be that the mistakes must have been intentional. But this conclusion is not necessarily the correct one, for a compositor seldom attempts to follow the sense of the 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 mto 1 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 the argument, for cat is not spelt with a final ' c ' ; so the line was was changed to read, ' Shall reign the He cat of the lowest hell.' — 'Cornhill Magazine.' '