A few weeks ago in this space, I posted a piece about Taylor Swift and the history of public education in the United States. Except that apparently I didn’t. A few hours after the post went live, I received a text from one of my aunts saying, “Am I the first to point out a spelling error?…”
She was the first, and the error was unfortunate because instead of typing public education, I had accidentally left out a very important letter l. Fortunately, I was able to fix it quickly and if any of the rest of you noticed, you were gracious enough to cut me some slack.
I try to be a meticulous editor, but anyone who has followed this blog for very long has probably spotted the occasional error that gets through. Often either the hubs or my eagle-eyed mother will discover them and point out the mistakes spell check won’t catch. One time a reader I don’t know personally was kind enough to politely point out that the country of Wales is spelled differently than the marine mammal with a similar name.
You’ve all been very kind over the years, and as far as I know none of my silly typos have led to any controversy. Royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were not so fortunate. In 1632, they stood trial in the court of King Charles I for a mistake that made its way into their 1631 re-printing of the King James Bible. The mistake occurred in Exodus 20:14, which should read: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The problem was that this printing omitted the word not.
Barker and Lucas had to answer for the slip-up to the tune of £300. That’s roughly £56,000 today, or about 75,000 US Dollars, which is a pretty steep price to pay for three little letters. To make matters worse, the gentlemen lost their publishing license.
While nearly all of the one thousand misprinted Bibles were confiscated and destroyed before they had a chance to tear apart too many families, at least fifteen copies still exist today—seven in England, seven in the United States, and one in New Zealand.
A British rare book dealer named Henry Stevens obtained one of the copies in 1855 and called it the Wicked Bible, a name that has pretty much stuck since then. In the last decade, copies have changed hands for somewhere around $50,000, which means that if the descendants of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas still had a copy, they’d need to wait a few years yet to come out ahead.
I doubt any of my typos would fetch that kind of bling, and so my promise to you, dear reader is that I will continue to do my best to catch all the irritating little typos on this blog. I can assure you that if I ever suggest adultery as a good life choice, then you can assume it’s a terrible mistake.
I do feel for Barker and Lucas, though. It may be true that none of the errors that have occasionally popped up in my little corner of the blogosphere have been so grievous or costly. Still, I’m certainly aware that no matter how cautious an editor one may be, it can be a big risk to put your words out there in a pubic space.
Author Sarah Angleton 