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No sooner had the printing press been invented than the typo appeared. For the NYR Online this week, Jo Livingstone visits an exhibition of errata slips, publishers’ sometimes humble, sometimes proud, occasionally sarcastic, and surprisingly poetic acknowledgments of mistake(s) in their already printed books. Since the fifteenth century they’ve been dropping these compendia of “faults escaped in printing” into the pages or pasting them onto the backboards of everything from atlases to bank directories to Ulysses. “Publishing is a terrifying business precisely because mistakes are inevitable,” Livingstone writes. But there is comfort in knowing that even the Good Book is subject to human error:

The paradigmatic misprint happened to a Bible. Three little letters didn’t make it into an English printing in 1631. An incredibly dangerous joke? Satan guiding man’s hand? Either way, a whole batch of Bibles went into the world commanding, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Below, alongside Livingstone’s essay, are five articles and one extensive letter from our archives about errors, typos, and mistranslation.

Jo Livingstone
We Goofed

A new exhibition celebrates the humble poetry of errata.

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Evan Kindley
To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

—February 11, 2021

Daniel Drake
Proofreading the President

Mocking Donald Trump’s twisting circumlocutions is cold consolation—ask anyone who bought a “Bushisms” calendar the January before the United States invaded Iraq.

—October 8, 2019

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John Kidd
The Scandal of ‘Ulysses’

The transparent scheme to replace Ulysses outright with another version was apparently partly motivated by the hopes of the Joyce estate…for a new copyright to run seventy-five years from 1984. This could be accomplished only by creating an entirely new work, which in an unintended sense has been done. The new edition’s supporters tried to persuade the public and professoriate that all previous editions were unusable. The assault on the old text centered on a handful of typos that were rehashed again and again, as if the slip “beard” for “bread” (found only in 1961) proved all editions since 1922 unworthy of attention.…

During Joyce’s life hundreds of typographical errors in the first edition were corrected, but a similar number of new variants slipped in unnoticed in later editions, meaning that the first and last lifetime texts were equally distant from what Joyce intended. Suddenly, in the 1980s we were told that there were “thousands” of errors all along, at least seven on every page. That claim is a sales pitch for the new edition, and has no basis in the texts themselves. Ulysses: The Corrected Text is not a purified text, but a different version from what Joyce conceived, authorized, and saw into print.

—June 30, 1988

Thomas F. Staley, John O’Hanlon, and Hans Walter Gabler,
reply by John Kidd
The Continuing Scandal of ‘Ulysses’: An Exchange

Kidd has, admittedly, uncovered a small number of errors in the 1984 Ulysses (for which he should be thanked), but he has deliberately exaggerated the moment of these out of all sane proportion and has attached them to false (in some cases, knowingly false) allegations, misrepresentations, innuendoes and insults (for which he should be censured).

—September 29, 1988

E. A. J. Honigmann
The New Lear

“Is it really possible that, after so many centuries of tinkering and bickering, the editors still have not produced a text of King Lear as Shakespeare would have wanted it? That the world has persuaded itself that this play is the master’s masterpiece—without noticing that the editors have jumbled together words, lines, and episodes (from Q and F, the quarto text of 1608 and the folio text of 1623) that were actually meant to replace each other, and that sometimes make little sense as now printed?”

—February 2, 1984

Vladimir Nabokov
On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord

An infelicitous translation of Eugene Onegin from a pitiless and irresponsible paraphrast bristles with crippled clichés and mongrel idioms, an inadequate knowledge of English and wobbly Russian.

—April 30, 1964

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