Agreed. I don’t see how the concept of a copyright trap can even be applicable to a work of fiction.
Copyright traps are based on the premise that there is a reality outside of the work being produced. And writers are supposed to do their own original research from that common reality. But if one writer is worried that other writers may simply copy his results rather than do their own original research, he’ll intentionally add fake results. Then if other writers report the same results, he can point to these fake results as evidence that they copied his work rather than do their own original research.
But without a common reality to work with, there’s nothing to conduct original research on.
That’s the print series by British publisher Unwin, I think. There was also a typo in the Unwin print of “The Hobbit” when Bilbo was declining Gandalf’s suggestion of going out on an adventure: “I should thing so.”
But note… The original quotation was “Puckering his brows”. Which makes sense – brows = eyebrows, puckering = bring together, but is not current colloquial English. Your brow is your forehead. I’ve never heard of a person having more than one “brow”
So is that a type too? Is it corrected in other editions?
If I remember correctly, it’s because they’ve just left Lothlorien, and he’s confused because the phase of the moon reveals he’d lost count of the days, indicating they’d been there either no time at all or a full month, both of which seem wrong.
I don’t think it’s clumsy writing at all. Tolkien liked describing nature and landscapes, but he was smart enough to know that readers’ minds can wander if you give too much unattributed description*. So he anchored his description as an observation of a character, not just the random woolgathering of an author.
To answer a different way. I don’t think ‘copyright trap’ makes sense in this context. The work is copyrighted with or without a clumsy sentence stuck in there. Anyone copying the work would make for an obvious copy whether the sentence was there or not.
Copyright trap makes sense for things like maps that are representations of real things. Intentional errors reveal a copy because those errors don’t exist in the real thing.
Anyone copying the Lord of the Rings will obviously be copying Lord of the Rings. I don’t see how copyright trap could have any use at all.
You will find copyright traps pretty often in commercial mailing lists. For example, I used to buy mailing lists of radio stations from Broadcasting Magazine, and their address lists included stations with PO box addresses in Washington DC, where they were headquartered. Those stations didn’t exist, as I knew because I also lived there, and the stations were not listed in their almanac of stations either.
“Brow” can sometimes refer to the entire ridge above a person’s eye, of which most people only have one, or it can refer to the eyebrows, in which case two is the more common configuration.
No, it is the moon phase, as Filbert said, and he brings it up in conversation a day or so later. Someone else can track the quote down, but broadly speaking, he realizes a whole month must have passed while they were in Lothlorien, but he can’t believe the evidence of the skies, because he can remember several days but nothing like a month’s worth, and this leads to a discussion of the sensation of Time in an elven city.