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/364

350 made the texts of their books intolerably incorrect. Even the famous Christopher Plantin of Antwerp was not beyond all reproach. One of his eulogists has to admit sorrowfully that he found in Plantin's enormous Polyglot Bible many errors of paging which his scholarly proof-readers had overlooked.

The apology of John Froben of Basle for his errata is really pathetic: "I do everything I can to produce correct editions. In this edition of the New Testament in Greek I have doubled my care and my vigilance; I have spared neither time nor money. I have engaged with difficulty many correctors of the highest ability, among them John Oecolampadius, a professor of three languages. Erasmus himself has done his best to help me."

This book was in press for a year, but after all this care it had errata of one and a half pages.

Erasmus himself charged one of the workmen of Froben with intended malice in perverting (in another book) his tribute of admiration to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary to a passage of unmentionable obscenity. He declared that he would have given three hundred crowns in gold to have prevented the scandalous error.

Examples enough have been presented to show that errors are not always detected by educated printers or by scholarly correctors, but the summing up may be left to earlier writers. Chevillier, writing in 1694, quotes many authors and printers in support of his proposition that a book without