My Evil Stepmother™ gave either me or my wife a copy of 501 Must-Read Books for Christmas. I’m pretty sure that the book is British, however, I’m damned sure the person who wrote the synopsis of Slaughterhouse Five is British. And a science fiction fan, to boot.
But I don’t think they really read the book, or that it made that much of an impression on them other than “I get to earn some quid by reading a book and writing a synopsis of it”. And the reason I think that is because every time they mention the main characters name, Billy Pilgrim, they get it wrong by calling him Billy Piper.
I don’t have the slightest idea how many people proof-read this one - at least the original author and the editor did, I’m sure, but this thing went to press with this glaring error and not a single person caught it.
What are some other noteworthy typos that you remember? The only other one I can think of off-hand is the Fox News (?) crawl that said, IIRC, the space shuttle was travelling at some multiple of the speed of light when it blew up over Texas.
The so-called “Wicked Bible” is well-known for its unfortunate omission of a word which led to one of the Ten Commandments reading “thou shalt commit adultery.”
There’s a legend going on about the origin of the French for a typo : “une coquille” (lit. a shell). As the possibly apocryphal story goes, in an official governmental bulletin on what size eggs could be sold on the market, the phrase “les coquilles doivent être propres” (the egg shells must be clean) became “les couilles doivent être propres” (the vulgar-word-for-testicles must be clean).
In 2000, a trader at Mizuho Securities intended to transmit an order to sell 1 share of J-Com Co at 610,000 yen but mistakenly wrote the order offering to sell 610,000 shares at 1 yen each. It cost the company $347 million.
And supposedly in the nineteenth century, there was a law passed on the duties on imported agricultural goods that had a superfluous comma. As I remember the story, it was supposed to mention that fruit trees were exempt from duty, but instead said that “fruit, trees” were exempt.
From a book collecting standpoint there are dozens, but one that comes to mind is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises - the true first has an infamous typo where “stopped” is spelled “stoppped.” In the first for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn there’s a “with the was” when it should be “with the saw”…
The presence of either changes the value of the book by thousands of dollars.
When I worked at a call center years ago we had a tech that tried to enter “The customer called to report his floppy disk will not work” Well if you change just one letter in that sentence it changes the entire meaning. This ticket was printed, and put on our training board as an example of what happens when you don’t read prior to hitting submit.
Years ago, I had one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom books with a notable type. There was a character named Tan Hadron of Hastor. At some point, he had escaped the clutches of the bad guys. The head of the baddies then said something along the lines of “Great will be the reward to the one who captures Hardon.”
A while ago, there was a letter doing the email rounds that was (certainly by all appearances) a genuine legal letter from one law firm to another. In it, the author of the letter wrote that another named lawyer in the firm would be “assisting” him. Or so he intended to write.
Instead the letter said that he would be “assfisted” by the junior lawyer.
It’s the kinda thing that would haunt your career forever.
There is a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode wherein Larry submits an obituary write-up for the local newspaper.
The deceased was to be described as a “beloved aunt” but evidently the “a” became a “c” after which time, Larry –as usual- found himself in quite the pickle.
A very similar typo once happened to a photograph of a certain Sesame Street character. I remember someone on this board who commented that they worked for a rival newspaper whose editor proudly had this picture.
