How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Technically known as “sorts,” the letters a print setter used were crafted from copper and stored like tiny inked seeds in a wooden case. Capitalized letters were kept in the top portion (hence “upper case”) and those that weren’t were stored in the bottom (thus “lower case”). Carefully fastened into an iron composing stick, the printer would spell out words and sentences which would be locked into a wood-frame galley and then organized into paragraphs and pages. Arranging sorts was laborious, and for smaller fonts, such as those used in a Bible, the pieces could be just a millimeter across. Long hours and fatigue, repetitive motion and sprained wrists, dim light and strained eyes—mistakes were inevitable.
The King James Version of the Bible has exactly 783,137 words, but unfortunately for the London print shop of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, official purveyors to King Charles I, their 1631 edition left out three crucial letters, one crucial word—”not.” As such, their version of Exodus 20:14 read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Their royal patron was not amused. This edition was later deemed the “Wicked Bible.”
Literature’s history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. It’s the shadow narrative of expression—how we fail because of sloppiness, or ignorance, or simple tiredness. Blessed are the copyeditors, for theirs is a war of eternal attrition. Nothing done by humans is untouched by such fallenness, for to err is the universal lot of all of us. Authors make mistakes, as do editors, publishers, printers (and readers).
If error were simply an issue of a wrong comma here or an incorrect word there it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, but mistakes undergird our lives, even our universe. They can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral. When Lockheed Martin designed the Mars Climate Orbiter using American units and NASA assumed that they’d used the metric system instead, a discrepancy that resulted in that satellite crashing into the red dust of the fourth planet from the sun—that was a mistake. And when the physician Alexander Fleming left out a culture plate which got contaminated, and he noticed the flourishing of a blue mold that turned out to be penicillin—that was a mistake. Errors in how people hear phonemes are what lead to the development of new languages; mistakes in an animal’s DNA propel evolution; getting lost can render new discoveries. Sometimes the flaw is that which is most beautiful.
Certainly, there are no shortage of them. Typographical errors such as those in the 1631 Bible are known as “errata,” and despite the incendiary mistake of Barker and Lucas, less salacious typos were common. A 1562 printing of the sternly doctrinaire translation the Geneva Bible prints Matthew 5:9 as “Blessed are the placemakers” rather than “peacemakers;” an 1823 version of the King James replaced “damsels” in Genesis 24:61 with “camels,” and as late as 1944 a printing of that same translation rendered the “holy women, who trusted God… being in subjection to their own husbands” in 1 Peter 3:5 as referring to those pious ladies listening to their “owl husbands.” But not all errors seemed as innocent—in 1637, an unlucky compositor deleted one letter “s” from the sixth word and the single comma which was to follow it from Luke 23:32, so that it read “And there were also two other malefactors [with Jesus],” those two accidental deletions blasphemously impugning the moral rectitude of the savior. A 1653 printing stated that it was the righteous who would inherit the earth, a 1716 edition records Jeremiah 31:34 as telling us to “sin on more,” and a 1763 volume replaces the penultimate word “no” with “a,” so that Psalm 14:1 reads “the fool hath said in his heart there is a God.” Those copies were pulped, the printers fined 3,000 pounds. One wonders if
