In 1631, about 200 years after Gutenberg printed the first Bible, Barker & Louis, the royal printers in London, were asked to print a new edition of the King James Bible. Here’s how they printed the Seventh Commandment: [1]
“Thou shalt commit adultery.”
For the omission of that tiny but oh-so-important word “not,” the printers lost their license and were fined 300 pounds sterling. Their book became known as “The Wicked Bible,” and even today, people cite that typo as an excuse to carouse.
When the error was discovered, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: “I knew the time when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the best, but now the paper is nought, the composers boys, and the correctors unlearned.”
They needed a better “corrector.” They needed a copy editor — or a more permissive archbishop.
That error may be the most famous book typo ever, and one of the oldest, but it’s certainly not the only one. It’s not even the only one that’s occurred in bibles. In honor of World Book and Copyright Day, here are some more.
Even before Barker & Louis, there was “The Great He Bible,” a first edition of the King James Bible in 1611. The end of Ruth 3:15 said “and he went into the city” (emphasis added), though it was Ruth who went[2]. Several versions of the Bible still say “he.” (They need copy editors, too.)
And a 2010 Australian book, The Pasta Bible, included a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto. It called for “salt and freshly ground black people” instead of “black pepper.” After the book was recalled, the publisher said, “When it comes to the proof-reader, of course they should have picked it up, but proof-reading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task.”[3]
Whenever an error makes it into print, the corrector/proof-reader/copy editor usually gets the blame. But chances are that many more errors are caught than make it through. And why not blame the writer?
Most typos involve extra letters (a “thought” that should have been “though”), the wrong letter (a “than” that should have been “that”), or homophones (“beech” instead of “beach”). They’re the hardest to catch, because no spelling checker yet invented can replace a human brain.
Some of the best and most famous writers have been victims of typos, including Ian Fleming (Moonraker), Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle), Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), and Leon Uris (Trinity). The site bookerrata.com even ranks books by their sloppiness.
Typos can make a book more valuable to collectors, especially if they change meaning unintentionally, and can help date a printing when the publisher has not. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, for example, was first printed in 1931 with a phrase describing small huts that “clung like flees to a dog’s back.” It was corrected to “clung like fleas” only after the third printing (emphasis added).[4]
How do these typos happen? The easy answer is that everyone is human. Even the best copy editors might slip up occasionally. And anecdotal evidence is that typos are more common these days, when fewer copy editors are employed by publishers of books, and everything else.
“Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing,” Virginia Heffernan wrote in The New York Times in 2011, “most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.”
Readers hate typos. The American Copy Editors Society has sponsored and highlighted research that shows that. But readers also love finding typos. Even if there is one typo in a 100,000-word book, the author, publisher, any editor involved will be pilloried, ridiculed, taunted.
Even when the “typo” isn’t one.
Herman Melville wrote a book about a great white whale. When it was published in England in 1851, it was called The Whale. But just before the American edition was to be published, Melville changed its title, to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. While the name of the whale was not hyphenated in the book (except in one place, probably, er, a typo), it was in the title. Of the dozens of editions printed since then, many do not have that hyphen in the title.
On the 125th anniversary of the book’s publication, G. Thomas Tanselle wrote that there was no definitive explanation for that hyphen, but that it’s not an error. It was the way the proofs were sent, presumably the way Melville wanted it, and the hyphenation may have followed a tendency of the time to hyphenate multi-word proper names (The New-York Times was so named until the 1890s).
“However,” Tanselle wrote, “one should hesitate to assume that the hyphenation of Moby-Dick resulted merely from carelessness of the part of a compositor.”[5] Or a copy editor.
