That searching analyst of the soul, Edgar Allan Poe, found among the
springs of human nature the quality of perverseness, the disposition to
do wrong because it is wrong; in reality, however, Poe's Imp of the
Perverse is active far beyond the boundaries of the human soul; his
disturbances pervade the whole world, and nowhere are they more
noticeable than in the printing office. This is so because elsewhere,
when things fall out contrary to rule, the result may often be neutral
or even advantageous; but in the printing office all deviations, or all
but a minute fraction, are wrong. They are also conspicuous, for, though
the standard is nothing less than perfection, the ordinary human eye is
able to apply the standard. These tricks of the malicious imp are
commonly called "misprints," "printer's errors," "errors of the press,"
or, more impartially, "errata" or "corrigenda." In the first three names
there is a tinge of unfairness, because the printer is by no means
responsible for all the mistakes that appear in type. The author is
usually partly to blame and may be chiefly; yet when he suffers a lapse
of memory or knowledge, he usually passes it off as a "printer's error."
Sometimes the author's handwriting may mislead the printer, but when so
good a biblical scholar as Mr. Gladstone wrote of _Daniel_ in the fiery
furnace, there was no possibility that the single name could have stood
in his manuscript for the names of the three men whose trial is
mentioned in the _book_ of Daniel. Even here the submission of proof
fixes the final responsibility on the author. But, quite apart from the
responsibility for them, the mistakes embalmed in type are among the
most interesting of all literary curiosities.
Misprints--to use the handiest term--range in importance from the
innocent and obvious, like a turned _a_, and the innocent and obvious
only to the expert, like a turned _s_, to a turned _n_, which may be
mistaken for a _u_, or the change or omission of a punctuation mark,
which may involve claims to thousands of dollars. Even the separation of
one word into two may reverse the meaning of the sentence, yet not
betray itself by any oddity of phrase, as when the atheist who had
asserted that "God is nowhere" found himself in print standing sponsor
for the statement that "God is now here." The same trick of the types
was played on an American political writer in his own paper regarding
his pet reform, which he meant to assert was "nowhere in existence." The
earliest printed books were intended to be undistinguishable from
manuscripts, but occasionally a turned letter betrayed them absolutely.
In the same way the modern newspaper now and then introduces an
unintentional advertisement of the linotype by presenting to its readers
a line upside down. Another trick is the mixing of two paragraphs, which
sometimes occurs even in books. The most famous instance of this blunder
is probably that which happened in the English "Men of the Time" for
1856, and which led to a serious lawsuit against the publishers. The
printer had mixed the biographies of the Bishop of Oxford and Robert
Owen the Socialist in such a way that Bishop Wilberforce was called "a
sceptic as it regards religious revelation." The mistake occurred in
locking up the forms. Doubtless both biographies had been approved by
their subjects, but apparently no proof was read after the fatal
telescoping of the two articles.
The last instance is an example of the patient waiting as much as the
ingenuity of the Imp of the Perverse, but in pure ingenuity he is
without a rival in mere human inventiveness. It certainly was a
resourceful Frenchman who translated "hit or miss" as "frappé ou
mademoiselle," and it was inspired ignorance on the part of a student
assistant in a college library who listed "Sur l'Administration de M.
Necker, par Lui Même" under "Même, Lui," as if it were the name of the
author of the book instead of being the French for "himself." But the
Imp of the Perverse aims higher than this. He did not hesitate in an
edition of the Bible published in London in 1631 to leave the _not_ out
of the one commandment from which its absence would be the most
noticeable. This was much worse than leaving out the whole commandment,
for it transformed a moral prohibition into an immoral command. The
printer in this case was fined three hundred pounds, or five hundred
dollars for each letter omitted. It is curious that the _same_ omission
was made in an edition of the Bible printed at Halle. A Vermont paper,
in an obituary notice of a man who had originally come from Hull, Mass.,
was made by the types to state that "the body was taken to Hell, where
the rest of the family are buried." In the first English Bible printed
in Ireland, "Sin no more" appears as "Sin on more." It was, however, a
deliberate joke of some Oxford students which changed the wording in the
marriage service from "live" to "like," so that a couple married out of
this book are required to live together only so long as they "both shall
like." An orator who spoke of "our grand mother church" was made to say
"our grandmother church." The public of Brown University was recently
greatly amused by a local misprint. The president of the university is
required by its ancient charter to be an "antipaedobaptist"; the types
reproduced the word as "antipseudobaptist," a word which would be a very
good Greek rendering of "hardshell." An express train at full speed
having struck a cow, the report was made to say that it "cut her into
calves." Sixty years ago the "London Globe" made the Registrar General
say that the city was suffering from a high rate of _morality_. The
ingenuity of our readers will supply the missing letter, as it also will
the the true reading of the following passage which appeared in an
English newspaper: "Sir Robert Peel has been out with a party of fiends
shooting peasants." It was an easy but astonishing blunder made in
German, in the substitution of "Mädchen" (girls) for "Mächten" (powers),
according to which Bismarck was asserted to be "trying to keep up honest
and straightforward relations with all the girls."
The Imp of the Perverse, when he descends upon the printing office,
sometimes becomes the Imp of the Perverted. Here his achievements will
not bear reproducing. Suffice it to say that in point of indecency he
displays the same superhuman ingenuity as in his more innocent pranks.
His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered,
and it would be a groveling nature that should seek to collect them; yet
the absence of this chapter from the world's book of humor means the
omission of a comic strain that neither Aristophanes nor Rabelais has
surpassed. Even as I write, a newspaper misprint assures me that
typesetting machines are no protection against the Imp of the Perverted.
Perhaps we may be pardoned the reproduction of one of the mildest of
these naughtinesses. A French woman novelist had written: "To know truly
what love is, we must go out of ourselves" (sortir de soi). The
addition of a single letter transformed this eminently respectable
sentiment into the feline confession: "To know truly what love is, we
must go out nights" (sortir de soir).
Sometimes the Blunder Sprite deliberately pits himself against author,
proof reader, and all their allies. The books printed by Aldus are
famous for their correctness, yet a few errors crept into them, so much
to the disgust of the great printer that he said he would gladly have
given a gold crown for each one to be rid of them. The famous Oxford
University Press is said to have posted up the first sheet of one of its
Bibles, with the offer of a guinea for every misprint that could be
found in it. None was found--until the book was printed. James Lenox,
the American collector, prided himself on the correctness of his reprint
of the autograph manuscript of "Washington's Farewell Address," which he
had acquired. On showing the book to Henry Stevens, the bookseller, the
latter, glancing at a page, inquired, "Why pap_a_r instead of pap_e_r?"
Mr. Lenox was overwhelmed with mortification; but Stevens sent for a
skillful bookbinder, who removed the objectionable _a_ and with a
camel's hair pencil substituted an _e_ for it, so that the demon was
conquered after all, but only through great trouble. How would it seem
possible to reissue a printed book, copy it exactly, and yet make an
atrocious blunder? The Type Spirit is equal to even this feat. The book
was a mathematical one, full of formulae. It was not reproduced page for
page, so it was perfectly easy for a signature mark to get printed and
appear in the middle of a page mixed up with an equation, to the
confusion of American mathematical scholarship. More tragic were the
misprints in a work by the Italian poet, Guidi, which are said to have
hastened his death. In an interesting volume by Henry B. Wheatley on
"Literary Blunders," the Tricksy Puck of the Press has revenged himself
on the author for his attacks by smuggling in a number of misprints,
among them one that he must have inspired in the mind of the author, the
spelling "Bride of Lammermuir," which has no warrant in Scott's novel
itself. In the same book is a reference to Shakespeare that diligent
search fails to verify. Thus no knowledge or skill avails against the
Kobold of the Case. The most baffling device of the imp is to cause a
new error in the process of correcting an old one. This residuary
misprint is one against which there is no complete protection. When
General Pillow returned from Mexico he was hailed by a Southern editor
as a "battle-scarred veteran." The next day the veteran called upon him
to demand an apology for the epithet actually printed, "battle-scared."
What was the horror of the editor, on the following day, to see the
expression reappear in his apology as "bottle-scarred"!
Occasionally, however, the mischief maker takes a notion to improve the
copy set before him. The world will never know how often this has
happened, for authors are just as willing to take credit for
excellencies not their own as to lay on the printer the blame for their
own oversights. In one of Artemus Ward's articles he had spoken of a
starving prisoner as appealing for something to eat. The proof rendered
it something to _read_. The humorist accepted the substitution as an
additional absurdity. The French poet, Malherbe, once welcomed a
misprint as an improvement on what he had written. There can be no doubt
that, had there been no misprints in Shakespeare's quartos and folios,
half the occupation of Shakespeare scholarship would have been lacking.
Sometimes the original manuscript turns up--unfortunately not in
Shakespeare's case--to confute some or all of the ingenious editors. A
learned professor changed the word "unbodied" in Shelley's "Skylark" to
"embodied," and some critics approved the change; but the poet's
manuscript in the Harvard University Library makes the former reading
clear beyond question. One might say that in these cases the Imp of the
Perverse plants himself like a fatal microbe in the brain of the
unfortunate editor. When that brilliant work, "The Principles of Success
in Literature," by George Henry Lewes, appeared in the "Fortnightly
Review," the expression "tilt stones from a cart" (used to describe
careless writing) was printed with _l_ as the first letter. When the
chapters were reissued in America, the proofreader, warned by the
presence of numerous other gross misprints, naturally corrected the
meaningless "lilt" to the obvious and natural "tilt." This change at
first escaped the attention of the American editor, who in the second
edition insisted on restoring the original misprint and even defended
his misjudgment in a note. It is worth adding that the Oxford English
Dictionary takes the misprint as too obvious for comment and quotes the
passage under "tilt."
The most daring feat of the typographic Angel of the Odd--to adopt
another of Poe's expressions--is the creation of what Professor Skeat
called "ghost words," that is, words that seem to exist but do not. A
misprint in Scott's "Monastery" of "morse" for "nurse" was accepted
without question by readers and gravely explained by scholars. Some of
these words, of which there are scores, are due to the misreading of
crabbed manuscripts, but not a few have originated in the printing
office. It must be remembered that they make their way into the
dictionaries. For another instance let the reader open Worcester's
Dictionary to the word _phantomnation_. He will see it defined as
"illusion" and referred to Pope. In Webster's Dictionary, however, he
will learn its true character, as a ghost word formed by running
together the two words _phantom nation_.
The printing of poetry involves all the possible mistakes liable to
prose and, owing to the form of poetry, some new ones. Thus in
Pickering's Aldine edition of Milton, two words of one line in "Samson
Agonistes" are dropped down into the next, making the two lines of
uneven length and very much hurting the emphasis. The three-volume
reprint of this edition dutifully copies the misprint. In the Standard
edition of Dr. Holmes's "Works" printed at the Riverside Press, in the
unusual case of a poem in stanzas being broken up into a dialogue, the
end of one speech, carried over to the following page, has been assigned
to the next speaker, thus spoiling both the sense and the metre. The
most extraordinary instance that has ever come under my eye occurs in a
special edition of John Hay's "Poems," issued as a college prize volume
and very elegantly printed at a well-known press. One poem has
disappeared entirely except a single stanza, which has been attached to
another poem with which it has no connection, not even agreeing with it
in metre.
The list of errata, the printer's public confession of fault, is rather
rare in modern books, but this is due as much to the indifference of the
public as to better proofreading. When Edwin Arnold's "Light of Asia"
took the reading world by storm, a New York reprint was issued, which we
commend to anyone looking for classical examples of misprinted books. It
averages perhaps a gross misprint to every page. Possibly extreme haste
to beat the Boston edition in the market may have suggested dispensing
with the proof reader. Of course a publisher who could so betray his
customers would never offer them even the partial amends of a list of
errata. Sometimes the errors are picked up while the book is still in
press, and in that case the list of errata can be printed as an
extension of the text; sometimes the best that can be done is to print
it on a separate slip or sheet and either insert it in the book or
supply it to purchasers. Both these things happened in the case of that
early American book, Mather's "Magnalia." The loose list of errata was
printed on the two inner pages of one fold the size of the book. In the
two hundred years that have elapsed, most of these folded sheets have
been lost, with the financial result that a copy of the book with them
will bring twice as much as one without them, these two leaves weighing
as much in the scales of commerce as the other four hundred. Sometimes a
misprint establishes the priority of a copy, the error having been
silently corrected while the sheets were going through the press, and
thus adds to its value in the eyes of the collector. The extent of these
ancient lists of errata staggers belief. Cardinal Bellarmin was obliged
to issue an octavo volume of eighty-eight pages to correct the misprints
in his published works, and there is on record a still huger list of
errata, extending to one hundred and eleven quarto pages.
But we must not suppose that misprints began with the invention of
printing. The name did, but not the thing named. In earlier times it was
the copyist who made the mistakes and bore the blame. It is easy to see
how in Greece and Rome, when one reader read aloud a book which perhaps
a hundred copyists reproduced, a great number of errors might creep into
the copies, and how many of these would result from confusion in
hearing. Every copy was then an edition by itself and a possible source
of error, calling therefore for its own proofreading. It is accordingly
no wonder that the straightening out of classic texts is still going on.
Had Chaucer, who wrote over a hundred years before printing was
introduced into England, been able to read once for all the proof of his
poems, he would not have had to write that feeling address to his
copyist, or scrivener, with which we may fitly take leave of our
subject.
Adam scryveyne, if ever it thee byfalle,
Boece or Troylus for to wryten nuwe,
Under thy long lokkes thowe most have the scalle,
But affter my makyng thowe wryte more truwe;
So offt a daye I mot thy werk renuwe,
It to corect, and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy necglygence and rape.