PRINTERS’ ERRORS.

It must be, to say the least of it, annoying to the speaker or writer possessed of any degree of sensitiveness, when he finds his plainest statements, or it may be his most carefully prepared flights of fancy, turned into nonsense by the substitution or omission of a letter in the printing; and by some unhappy chance it often seems that the mistake is made in just such a manner and place as will do the most mischief. The unlucky poet who wrote,

must have been completely crushed when the line appeared as—

We can sympathise also with the poet who, writing of his love, asserted that he had ‘kissed her under the silent stars,’ and found the compositor made him state that he ‘kicked her under the cellar stairs.’ True, it has been doubted if these two poets ever existed; but others, of less mythologic fame, have suffered as badly at the hands of the printer. Burns, in a cheap edition of his works, is made to say,

A well-known temperance lecturer was indignant at finding the sentiment ascribed to him that ‘drunkenness was jolly,’ whereas he had declared that it was ‘folly.’

For the explanation of many of these blunders it is necessary to bear in mind that in setting up the type the compositor has the various letters arranged in separate divisions of his case and selects them one by one as required. Habit enables him to do this with extreme speed and accuracy; but it will easily be seen that the presence of a wrong letter in a division or a dip into the wrong box may occasion one of these unhappy blemishes. In this manner we find oats rendered ‘cats;’ songs, ‘tongs;’ poets, ‘posts;’ or as once happened in the report of a railway accident, ‘confusions of the limbs’ for ‘contusions of the limbs.’ And by the substitution of n for h, a newspaper report was made to state that ‘the people rent the air with their ten thousand snouts.’

The blame, however, does not always rest with the compositor. Incorrect spelling and slovenly writing have much to answer for, especially in the case of proper names and quotations from foreign languages. Boerhaave becomes ‘Boershave;’ and Et tu, Brute! ‘Eh, the Brute!’ Authors should remember that the proof-reader is fallible; he is not, as is sometimes expected, a ‘Universal Compendium’ of facts, people, places. If a passage reads clearly and grammatically, although conveying anything but the sense intended, it is not to be wondered at that the error is often undetected until too late. Much surprise was occasioned by Sir Archibald Alison, in his History of Europe, including amongst the persons present at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington the name of ‘Sir Peregrine Pickle.’ There can be little doubt that the author had made an unconscious slip, intending to name Sir Peregrine Acton. Sir Thomas Brassey having referred in a speech to the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, the compositor transformed the title into the ‘Golden Treasury of Soups and Cynics.’ A report in a Manchester paper of a recent dramatic performance mentioned the well-known farce of No. 1 Round the Corner under the amusing and suggestive title of ‘No One Round the Corner.’

Mistakes in punctuation, such as the omission or misplacing of a comma, may cause serious alteration to the sense of a passage. The contract made for lighting the town of Liverpool by wick lamps, during the year 1819, was rendered void by the misplacing of a comma in the advertisements, thus: ‘The lamps at present are about four thousand and fifty, and have in general two spouts each, composed of not less than twenty threads of cotton.’ The contractors would have proceeded to furnish each lamp with the said twenty threads; but this being only half the usual quantity, the Commissioners discovered that the difference arose from the comma following, instead of preceding, the word ‘each.’ In the following instance, it was no doubt a bachelor-compositor who, in setting up the toast, ‘Woman, without her, man would be a savage!’ got the comma in the wrong place, and made the sentence read, ‘Woman, without her man, would be a savage!’

All the above-mentioned errors may fairly be ascribed to carelessness and mischance. Others, however, are on record which have been committed knowingly and intentionally, and so can scarcely be classed as errors. They have been mostly connected with Biblical matters, and intended to further party interests. It is said that Field, a printer of the time of Charles I., was paid fifteen hundred pounds by the Independents to alter a single letter in the third verse of Acts VI., so as to make the word we read ‘ye,’ and so give the right of appointing pastors to the people, and not to the apostles. The deplorable state of the press in Field’s time may be realised from the fact that Bishop Usher, on his way to preach at Paul’s Cross, asked at a stationer’s for a copy of the Bible; and on examining it, found, to his astonishment, that the text from which he was about to preach was not in the book! The well-known ‘Vinegar Bible’ was published in 1717, and obtains its name from the Parable of the Vineyard being printed as the Parable of the Vinegar. One of the most wilful alterations of the text, and one which cost its perpetrator her life, was committed by the widow of a German printer. One night, while an edition of the Bible was being printed in her house, she took the opportunity of altering the word Herr into ‘Narr,’ making the verse read, ‘he shall be thy fool,’ instead of ‘he shall be thy lord.’

The celebrated Bibles of Sixtus V. are eagerly sought for by collectors. Their sole fame is the multitude of errata which crowd their pages, notwithstanding that His Holiness Sixtus V. carefully superintended every sheet as it passed through the press, and finally prefixed to the first edition a bull forbidding any alteration in the text.

A curious jumble appeared in a cabled critique of Mr Irving’s acting on one of his appearances in the States. Instead of saying that ‘the taste for Irving, like that for olives, must be cultivated,’ the critic was represented as giving utterance to the incomprehensible assertion that ‘the toast for Irving, like the toast for olives, must be cut elevated.’

A Glasgow divine, and one of Her Majesty’s chaplains in Scotland, was lately reported as saying that ‘personally he violated the Lord’s Day as much as any member of the Court.’ ‘Venerated’ was probably the word actually employed by the reverend gentleman.

Similarly, in an edition of Men of the Time published in 1856, the then Bishop of Oxford is thus described: ‘Oxford, Bishop of (Rt. Rev Samuel). A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A sceptic as regards religious revelations, he is yet an out-and-out believer in spirit manifestations.’ This description really belonged to ‘Owen (Robert) of Lanark.’ The edition was soon suppressed, but not before the Bishop had possessed himself of a copy for his private library.

Although both the chaplain and the bishop had reason to complain of their treatment, it must have been considerably more astonishing and mortifying for Herr Franz Liszt, who is still delighting his musical admirers with his productions, to find that in Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates (1870) he is represented as dying in October 1868.

The Queen’s Speech at the opening of a recent session of parliament was hurriedly published in a Scotch newspaper without being revised by the press-corrector, and Her Majesty, instead of saying that certain negotiations ‘will, I doubt not, lead to satisfactory results,’ was reported as saying, ‘will, I doubt, not lead to satisfactory results.’ So much for the misplacing of a comma!

With increased literature have come better systems of ‘reading’ and correcting, and greater accuracy has been attained. Such mistakes as above quoted are exceptional, and the morning newspaper may now be read week after week with but few misprints. A good example of accuracy in printing tables of figures—in which it is so difficult to avoid errors—may be seen in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, every monthly part of which contains from seven to eight hundred thousand figures. Astronomical and mathematical tables require great care in printing, and very few are issued which can be relied upon as absolutely correct. Charles Babbage superintended the production of a set of trigonometrical tables in 1827 which perhaps stand unrivalled in this respect. They were prepared for the Ordnance Survey of England and Ireland, and a limited number of copies printed—it is said only thirty. They consist of tables of logarithms and log. sines, tangents, cosines and cotangents, to every second. Roughly speaking, they contain about six millions of figures. The proof-sheets were revised by several sets of readers, and were carefully examined and compared with other tables no less than seven times. From Mr Babbage’s preface, we learn that after the final stereotyping, seven errors were found in the logarithms and one in the differences. These being corrected, the stereotyped sheets were hung up in the Hall at Cambridge University, and a reward offered to any one who could find an inaccuracy. Since their first issue in 1827, no error has been discovered, and it may reasonably be concluded that they are absolutely correct.