Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/792



R. CARLYLE somewhere relates how Smelfungus, betting that he would find five blunders by the hour in Mignet's French Revolution, won easily. A competent critic would more easily glean a handsome crop of typographical errors from almost any of the periodical publications of the day; nay, even from the sumptuously-printed books put forth by the leading publishers of the land. An entertaining volume might be written concerning the curiosities of typographical errata, which, although amusing to readers, are often most exasperating to editors and authors. Baron Grimm, in his Memoirs, mentions the circumstance of a French writer having died in a fit of anger in consequence of a favorite work, which he had himself revised with great care, having been printed with upward of three hundred errors, half of which had been made by the corrector of the press.

A single letter is often of the greatest importance. In Kingsley's "Andromeda," a thinking compositor perverted "Here" into " Hebe." He "thought" the manuscript in error, "corrected" it accordingly, and the perversion passed. "I know not," says Kingsley, "whether other authors find it as impossible as I do to avoid foolish oversights of this kind, even after a second revise. If they do, I wonder that the Newgate Calendar gives us (as far as I am aware) no case of an author's being hanged for killing a printer."

The earliest book, properly so called, is now believed to be the Bible, commonly called the Mazarin Bible, printed more than four hundred years ago, and teeming with typographical errors. Some two hundred years later, there was an edition printed in England, in which the important word not was omitted in the seventh commandment, from which circumstance it has ever since been known as the "Adulterous Bible." Another edition, known as the Pearl Bible, appeared about the same date, filled with errata, a single specimen of which will suffice—"Know ye not the ungodly shall inherit the kingdom of God?" The story is well known of the printer's widow in Germany, who, while an edition of the Bible was printing at her establishment, altered that sentence of subjugation to her husband pronounced on Eve in Genesis, so that, instead of reading "he shall be thy lord," it said—"and he shall be thy fool." Copies of this edition were bought up at enormous prices. Bibles were once printed which affirmed that "all Scripture was profitable for destruction," while another edition was said to contain six thousand blunders. Sterne, a solid scholar, was the first who summed up the three thousand and six hundred faults that were in the printed Bibles of London. Still another edition of the sacred volume is known as the "Vinegar Bible," from the erratum in the title to the twentieth chapter of St. Luke, in which "Parable of the Vineyard" is printed "Parable of the Vinegar."