Everyone makes mistakes, but we all hope they’re forgotten as soon as possible. If you’re unlucky, though, your mistakes could be remembered for centuries.
A new exhibit at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library showcases a rogues’ gallery of books with some of the most egregious errors in the history of printing.
One time you definitely don’t want to make a mistake is if you’re printing a thousand copies of the Holy Bible under orders from King James himself.
“Our example of that is in this front case, and it's the so-called Wicked Bible, which famously has the Seventh Commandment as ‘thou shalt commit adultery," said Rachel Churner, co-curator of this exhibit. “Of course, when it was produced and the mistake was discovered, the printers were censored by the king. The Bibles were destroyed, all but a handful. And it's this incredible sort of — it's not exactly luck — this incredible privilege that the Beinecke has in its holdings this Bible.”
Along with a correction, sort of. In pencil, above the mistake, someone has added the word 'not,' just to set the record straight.
This exhibit is a history of errata. For hundreds of years, if editors noticed mistakes after a book hit the presses, they didn’t order a whole new printing. That’d be too expensive. Instead, they’d print an errata sheet listing corrections for readers and stick it in the back of the book.
“And it lists the mistakes, tracking the correction and the mistake itself," Churner said. "So that's the sort of key to it. It's not simply to say, ‘Oh, we might have made an error here,’ but to say this exact line with this exact error has been made.”
The history of errata is almost as old as the history of printing itself. In 1455, Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, which, for the record, said you shouldn’t commit adultery.
Within 50 years, books were everywhere in Europe. We can trace errata back to Thomas More, saint, philosopher, author of Utopia, and the guy Henry the Eighth had killed for not letting him get a divorce. So, you know, an expert in mistakes.
“Thomas More standardized it," Churner said. She shows me one of More’s treatises from 1529: The "Dialogue of Divers Matters."
"It sets up this format where you have page number, line number, mistake and then correction, almost always in the pattern ‘for X read Y.'" (X being the mistake and Y being the correction.) “Which lends itself to beautiful and unexpected poetry, so that you get these little mistakes that are quite serendipitous.”
And sometimes they feel like a sly little bit of social commentary.
“One of my favorite examples from Coleridge in 1795," Churner said. "Where he says, on page 61, for ‘murder,’ read ‘fight for his king and country.’"
One of the most epic errata lists came in 1922, when James Joyce published his notoriously difficult novel ‘Ulysses.” Only, most of them weren’t even real mistakes.
“Ulysses, very famously, included a very long seven-page errata with hundreds of corrections, and many of these corrections were actually reintroducing mistakes that had been diligently removed by copy editors and proofreaders.”
Joyce filled “Ulysses” with his own idiosyncratic spellings and wordplay. Like spelling a character’s name differently at different points in the book. Which can look a lot like mistakes if you don’t get what he’s going for.
“He wanted mistakes. You know, the insistence that names be inconsistently spelled throughout Ulysses was something that a good proofreader would not allow. And for Joyce, it was necessary to show that he himself was sort of making fun of the reader, playing with the reader.”
James Joyce, weird little guy that he was, got a kick out of the whole thing.
"Joyce said when he was talking about this 1922 errata, ‘These are not misprints, but beauties of my style, hitherto undreamt of,'" Churner said.
That's where she and her co-curator, Geoff Kaplan, got the title of their exhibit -- ‘Beauties of My Style.’ Because mistakes can be beautiful.
“We gave a presentation to the librarians," Kaplan said. “And after the presentation, one of the librarians said, ‘In this moment of digitization and ever-increasing pressures of AI, the human error is something beautiful, something desirable, something that has a value and currency, something that has warmth and sensibility. That was a really nice perspective.”
Kaplan said you don’t see many errata lists in the backs of books anymore.
“It takes a lot fewer resources to produce a book now than 500 years ago," he said. "But maybe the question, too, is about accountability in a post-digital age. Like, how does a book get produced now? And in that mode of production, how is an error accounted for?”
Some books crowdsource their copy-editing to readers these days and publish the errata online. No need to stick inserts in the backs of books. Kaplan says this exhibit has him thinking about the psychology behind errata.
“Why do we make mistakes, and why are we compelled to correct them?" he said. "Why are some of them embarrassing? And why do we have these responses to this idea of a mistake, even the notion of a mistake can be bent and twisted?”
And maybe that question will lead to another exhibit someday. In the meantime, you can see ‘The Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake’ at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library until November 29.
