A Word, Please: Errata is human, to proofread divine

The year is 1631 and you’ve just returned home from a shopping trip to Ye Olde Barnes & Noble, shiny new Bible in hand.

You’re eager to dig in. You’ve been coveting your neighbor’s donkey for some time and you’re worried he wasn’t bluffing when he said, “You’ll burn for this.”

But flipping through the gilded pages, long before you even get to any coveting, you’re stopped dead in your tracks by the last edict you’d ever expect from the Almighty: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

You blink. You read it again. Then again. Shalt commit? No “not” in there? Just “shalt,” as in, just do it?

You’re more than a little surprised. You can’t imagine what the Man Upstairs could be thinking. But you’re a big believer he works in mysterious ways. So, whispering a solemn “Thy will be done,” you head out to Ye Olde Singles Bar.

The scenario, of course, is preposterous. But the commandment is real: In the 1600s, a publisher in Britain put out 1,000 copies of a Bible with this most unfortunate of typos before the error was finally caught — and punished. King Charles fined the publishers 300 pounds and revoked their printing license.

Most copies of the print run known as “The Wicked Bible” were destroyed. Today, only 20 survive. But if you’re lucky enough to get to New Haven, Conn., you can see one in person in the Hanke Gallery at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, where the exhibit “Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake” runs through Nov. 29.

The entire exhibit is dedicated to a subject near and dear to my (and every copy editor’s) nightmares: typos. And in a way it’s reassuring to know my professional blooper reel (like the time I wrote in this column that a vowel is a verb, or the time I misspelled my own name — my first name) is part of a long, proud tradition of published screw-ups.

Central to the exhibit are “errata lists” — printed documents that, starting in the 15th century, were inserted in books to acknowledge and correct mistakes that weren’t caught before the printing presses started running. The lists, part of the collection of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, include a fold-out errata from Allen Ginsberg’s 1968 “Airplane Dreams.” There’s also a self-published copy of “100 Percent: The Story of a Patriot,” wherein author Upton Sinclair accidentally claimed that a founding member of America’s communist party was a government agent.

The exhibit also displays two copies of Nicolaus Copernicus’ 1543 “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.” In one version, Copernicus says that the Earth revolves around the sun. In another, someone “corrected” Copernicus by saying this was just a “theory.”

The title of the exhibit is borrowed from James Joyce. Apparently, the first print of “Ulysses” was laden with errors, though it’s debatable whether most of those happened because his handwriting was nearly illegible or the errors were faithful representations of Joyce’s own mistakes. A sentence in a letter he wrote to his wife about the typos may hold a clue: “The edition you have is full of printer’s errors.”

When Joyce’s publisher set to correcting the errors the following year, the author balked at some of the edits, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Someone, however, must have disagreed, because later printings of the book came with a seven-page errata sheet pointing out a whopping 200 mistakes.

As for the “beauty,” or doozy, in that 1631 Bible: Rumors later spread that the omission of “not” between “thou shalt” and “commit adultery” was sabotage by a rival publisher. But scholars have since concluded that the printing house probably just didn’t want to spend money on copy editors. Never a smart call, as “Juen Casagrande” can attest.

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.