Literary Blunders Part 9

In a Bible of 1634 the first verse of the 14th Psalm is printed as ''The fool hath said in his heart there is G.o.d''; and in another Bible of 1653 _worldly_ takes the place of _G.o.dly_, and reads, ''In order that all the world should esteem the means of arriving at worldly riches.''

If Field was not a knave, as hinted above, he was singularly unfortunate in his blunders; for in another of his Bibles he also omitted the negative in an important pa.s.sage, and printed I Corinthians vi. 9 as, ''Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of G.o.d?''

It is recorded that a printer's widow in Germany once tampered with the purity of the text of a Bible printed in her house, for which crime she was burned to death. She arose in the night, when all the workmen were in bed, and going to the ''forme'' entirely changed the meaning of a text which particularly offended her. The text was Gen. iii. 16 (''Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee'').

This story does not rest on a very firm foundation, and as the recorder does not mention the date of the occurrence, it must be taken by the reader for what it is worth. The following incident, vouched for by a well-known author, is, however, very similar. James Silk Buckingham relates the following curious anecdote in his _Autobiography_:--

''While working at the Clarendon Printing Office a story was current among the men, and generally believed to be authentic, to the following effect. Some of the gay young students of the University, who loved a practical joke, had made themselves sufficiently familiar with the manner in which the types are fixed in certain formes and laid on the press, and with the mode of opening such formes for correction when required; and when the sheet containing the Marriage Service was about to be worked off, as finally corrected, they unlocked the forme, took out a single letter _v_, and subst.i.tuted in its place the letter _k_, thus converting the word _live_ into _like_. The result was that, when the sheets were printed, that part

of the service which rendered the bond irrevocable, was so changed as to make it easily dissolved--as the altered pa.s.sage now read as follows:--The minister asking the bridegroom, 'Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife, to live together after G.o.d's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall _like_?' To which the man shall answer, 'I will.' The same change was made in the question put to the bride.''

If the culprits who left out a word deserved to be heavily mulcted in damages, it is difficult to calculate the liability of those who left out whole verses. When Archbishop Ussher was hastening to preach at Paul's Cross, he went into a shop to purchase a Bible, and on turning over the pages for his text found it was omitted.

Andrew Anderson, a careless, faulty printer in Edinburgh, obtained a monopoly as king's printer, which was exercised on

his death in 1679 by his widow. The productions of her press became worse and worse, and her Bibles were a standing disgrace to the country. Robert Chambers, in his _Domestic Annals of Scotland_, quotes the following specimen from an edition of 1705: ''Whyshouldit- bethougtathingincredi ble w you, y G.o.d should raise the dead?'' Even this miserable blundering could not have been much worse than the Pearl Bible with six thousand errata mentioned by Isaac Disraeli.

The first edition of the English Scriptures printed in Ireland was published at Belfast in 1716, and is notorious for an error in Isaiah. _Sin no more_ is printed _Sin on more_. In the following year was published at Oxford the well-known Vinegar Bible, which takes its name from a blunder in the running t.i.tle of the twentieth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, where it reads ''The parable of the vinegar,'' instead of ''The parable of the vineyard.'' In a Cambridge Prayer Book of 1778 the thirtieth verse of Psalm cv. is travestied as follows: ''Their land brought

forth frogs, yea seven in their king's chambers.'' An Oxford Bible of 1792 names St. Philip instead of St. Peter as the disciple who should deny Christ (Luke xxii. 34); and in an Oxford New Testament of 1864 we read, ''Rejoice, and be exceeding _clad_'' (Matt. v. 12).

To be impartial, however, it is necessary to mention a Cambridge Bible of 1831, where Psalm cxix. 93 appears as ''I will never _forgive_ thy precepts.'' A Bible printed at Edinburgh in 1823 contains a curious misprint caused by a likeness in p.r.o.nunciation of two words, Esther being printed for Easter, ''Intending after Esther to bring him forth to the people''

(Acts xii. 4). A misprint of the old hundredth Psalm (_do well_ for _do dwell_) in the Prayer Book might perhaps be considered as an improvement,--

''All people who on earth do well.''

Errors are specially frequent in figures, often caused by the way in which the characters are cut. The aim of the founder seems to be to make them as much alike as possible, so that it fre

quently requires a keen eye to discover the difference between a 3 and a 5. In one of Chernac's _Mathematical Tables_ a line fell out before going to press, and instead of being replaced at the bottom of the page it was put in at the top, thus causing twenty-six errors. Besides these, however, only ten errors have been found in the whole work of 1020 pages, all full of figures. Vieta's _Canon Mathematicus_ (1579) is of great rarity, from the author being discontented with the misprints that had escaped his notice, and on that account withdrawing or repurchasing all the copies he could meet with. Some mathematicians, to ensure accuracy, have made their calculations with the types in their own hands. In the _Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography_ there is a misprint in a date which confuses a whole article. William Ayrton, musical critic, is said to have been born in London about 1781, but curiously enough his father is reported to have been born three years afterwards (1784); and still more odd, that father was appointed gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1764, twenty

years before he is stated to have been born.

In connection with figures may be mentioned the terrible confusion which is caused by the simple dropping out of a decimal point. Thus a pa.s.sage in which 6.36 is referred to naturally becomes utter nonsense when 636 is printed instead. Such a misprint is as bad as the blunder of the French compositor, who, having to set up a pa.s.sage referring to Captain Cook, turned _de Cook_ into _de 600 kilos_. An amusing blunder was quoted a few years ago from a German paper where the writer, referring to Prince Bismarck's endeavours to keep on good terms with all the Powers, was made to say, ''Prince Bismarck is trying to keep up honest and straightforward relations _with all the girls_.'' This blunder was caused by the subst.i.tution of the word M

The French have always been interested in misprints, and they have registered a considerable number. One of the happiest is that one which was caused by Malherbe's bad writing, and induced him to

adopt the misprint in his verse in place of that which he had originally written.

The lines, written on a daughter of Du Perrier named Rosette, now stand thus:--

''Mais elle tait du monde o les plus belles choses Ont le pire destin, Et rose, elle a vcu ce que vivent les roses L'es.p.a.ce d'un matin.''

Malherbe had written,--

''Et Rosette a vcu ce que vivent les roses;''

but forgetting ''to cross his tees'' the compositor made the fortunate blunder of printing _rose elle_, which so pleased the author that he let it stand, and modified the following lines in accordance with the printer's improvement.

Rabelais nearly got into trouble by a blunder of his printer, who in several places set up _asne_ for _

Rabelais then laughed at his accusers for founding a charge of heresy against him on a printer's blunder, but there were strong suspicions that the misprints were intentional.

These misprints are styled by the French _coquilles_, a word whose derivation M. Boutney, author of _Dictionnaire de l'Argot des Typographes_, is unable to explain after twenty years' search. A number of _Longman's Magazine_ contains an article on these _coquilles_, in which very many amusing blunders are quoted.

One of these gave rise to a pun which is so excellent that it is impossible to resist the temptation of transferring the anecdote from those pages to these:--

''In the Rue Richelieu there is a statue of Corneille holding a roll in his hand, on which are inscribed the t.i.tles of his princ.i.p.al works. The task of incising these names it appears had been given to an illiterate young apprentice, who thought proper to spell _avare_ with two r's. A wit, observing this, remarked pleasantly, _Tiens, voil

In a newspaper account of Mr. Gladstone's religious views the word _Anglican_ is travestied as _Afghan_, with the following curious result: ''There is no form of faith in existence more effectually tenacious than the _Afghan_ form, which a.s.serts the full catholicity of that branch church whose charter is the English Church Prayer Book.''

In the diary of John Hunter, of Craigcrook, it is recorded that at one of the meetings between the diarist, Leigh Hunt, and Carlyle, ''Hunt gave us some capital specimens of absurd errors of the press committed by printers from his copy.

One very good one occurs in a paper, where he had said, 'he had a liking for coffee because it always reminded him of the _Arabian Nights_,' though not mentioned there, adding, 'as smoking does for the same reason.' This was converted into the following oracular words: 'As sucking does for the snow season'! He could not find it in his heart to correct this, and thus it stands as a theme for the profound speculations of the commentators.''

A very slight misprint will make a great difference; sometimes an unintelliglble word is produced, but sometimes the mere transposition of a letter will make a word exactly opposite in its meaning to the original, as _unite_ for _untie_. In Jeremy Taylor's _XXV. Sermons preached at Golden Grove: Being for the Winter half-year_ (London, 1653), p. 247, we read, ''It may help to unite the charm,'' whereas the author wished to say ''untie.''

The t.i.tle of Cobbett's _Horse-hoeing Husbandry_ was easily turned into _Horse-shoeing Husbandry_, that of the _Holy Grail_ into _Holy Gruel_, and Layamon's _Brut_ into Layamon's _Brat_.

A local paper, reporting the proceedings at the Bath meeting of the British a.s.so{sic} ciation, affirmed that an eminent chemist had ''not been able to find any _fluidity_ in the Bath waters.'' _Fluorine_ was meant.

It was also stated that a geologist a.s.serted that ''the bones found in the submerged forests of Devons.h.i.+re were closely representative of the British _farmer_.'' The last word should have been _fauna_.

The strife of _tongs_ is suggestive of a more serious battle than that of talk only; and the compositor who set up Portia's speech--

''. . . young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy''

(_Merchant of Venice_, act iii., sc. 2),

and turned the last words into _howling Tory_, must have been a rabid politician.

The transposition of ''He kissed her under the silent stars'' into ''He kicked her under the cellar stairs'' looks rather too good to be true, and it cannot be vouched for; but the t.i.tle ''Microscopic Character of the Virtuous Rocks of Montana''

is a genuine misprint for _vitreous_, as is also ''Buddha's perfect _uselessness_''

for ''Buddha's perfect sinlessness.'' It is rather startling to find a quotation from the _Essay on Man_ introduced by the words ''as the Pope says,'' or to find the famous painter Old Crome styled an ''old Crone.''

A most amusing instance of a misreading may be mentioned here, although it is not a literary blunder. A certain

black cat was named Mephistopheles a name which greatly puzzled the little girl who played with the cat, so she very sensibly set to work to reduce the name to a form which she could understand, and she arrived at ''Miss Pack-of-fleas.''

Sometimes a ludicrous blunder may be made by the mere closing up of two words; thus the orator who spoke of our ''grand Mother Church'' had his remark turned into a joke when it was printed as ''grandmother Church.'' A still worse blunder was made in an obituary notice of a well-known congressman in an American paper, where the reference to his ''gentle, manly spirit'' was turned into ''gentlemanly spirit.''

Misprints are very irritating to most authors, but some can afford to make fun of the trouble; thus Hood's amusing lines are probably founded upon some blunder that actually occurred:--

''But it is frightful to think What nonsense sometimes They make of one's sense, And what's worse, of one's rhymes.

''It was only last week, In my ode upon Spring, Which I meant to have made A most beautiful thing,

''When I talked of the dew-drops From freshly-blown roses, The nasty things made it From freshly-blown noses.

''And again, when, to please An old aunt, I had tried To commemorate some saint Of her clique who had died,

''I said he had taken up In heaven his position, And they put it--he'd taken Up to heaven his _physician_.''

Henry Stephens (Estienne), the learned printer, made a joke over a misprint. The word _febris_ was printed with the diphthong <_oe_>, so Stephens excused himself by saying in the errata that ''le chalcographe a fait une fivre longue (fbrem) quoique une fivre courte (febrem) soit moins dangereux.''

Allusion has already been made in the first chapter to Professor Skeat's ghost

words. Most of these have arisen from misreadings or misprints, and two extraordinary instances may be noted here.

The purely modern phrase ''look sharp''

was supposed to have been used in the time of Chaucer, because ''loke schappe'' (see that you form, etc.) of the ma.n.u.script was printed ''loke scharpe.'' In the other instance the scribe wrote _yn_ for _m_, and thus he turned ''chek matyde'' into ''chek yn a tyde.''[12]

[12] _Philol. Soc. Trans_. 1885-7, pp. 368-9.