Page:The practice of typography; correct composition; a treatise on spelling, abbreviations, the compounding and division of words, the proper use of figures and nummerals by De Vinne, Theodore Low, 1828-1914.djvu/363

Rh thousand pounds, and all obtainable copies of the edition were destroyed. To prevent error, Parliament forbade all unauthorized printing of the Bible.

It was the same spirit of mischief -making that prompted a woman in Germany to steal into her husband's printing-house by night and make an alteration in type that was ready for the press by changing the German word Herr to Narr, thereby perverting the passage in Genesis iii, 16, from "he shall be thy lord" to "he shall be thy fool." The story goes that she had to atone for this silly joke with her life.

Errors of the press were and are not confined to any nation. Erasmus said that the books printed in Italy were, without exception, full of faults, due largely to the parsimony of publishers who would not pay a proper price for the supervision of the copy. Books were so incorrectly printed in Spain during the sixteenth century that the authorities refused to license their publication before they had been approved by a censor appointed for the duty. He required that all faults noted by him should be corrected in an appended list of errata. Chevillier says that the printers of Geneva during the sixteenth century used execrable paper and