Double Misprints

I take the following paragraph from the Connersville (Ind.) Herald:

“The Guest Day meeting of the literary club will be held at the home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan Jones, of Indianapolis, will lecture on ‘William Butler Meats and the Garlic Revival.’”

I think the Lady of Shalott should have been brought in. Double misprints are rare, but I remember another which also was perpetrated in America but which has not quite so convincing an air of sheer accident as this one. A Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was described in his local paper as “a battle-scared veteran.” This imputation on his courage brought him to the office with a big stick and a demand that the paragraph should be reprinted with the offensive remark corrected. It was: but another misprint crept in and the word appeared as “bottle-scarred.” Every one who has dealings with the Press occasionally corrects, amid the mass of quite meaningless “literals,” a misprint that really makes some sort of sense. I myself in the last few months have had to emend printers’ references to Mr. Hotairio Bottomley and Mr. Edmund Goose. The former one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the derangement of letters being so extremely apt.