Gerhard’s Reviews > A Steroid Hit The Earth: A Hilarious Non-Fiction Account of History’s Greatest Typos > Status Update

PART-TIME DENTON HALL & BURGIN SOLICITORS SEEK A POOF READER
for their Word Processing Department.

Evening Standard

The Barker and Lucas or ‘Wicked’ Bible of 1631 is the most infamous example in a fairly distinguished line of holy typos. It omits the allimportant ‘not’s’ from Exodus 20:14, making the seventh commandment read, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. The printers were fined £300 (a lifetime’s wages) and most of the copies were recalled immediately.

The associate minister unveiled the church’s new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: ‘I Upped My Pledge – Up Yours.’

Particularly appealing to me is the gracious correction of a literary critic who, according to a Times review of his Illustrated History of English Literature, called Byron, Shelley and Keats the ‘triple freaks’ of English Literature rather than the triple peaks.

It does not help if the book is full if misprints and spelling mistakes.
The Spectator

Some words are destined to bring shame and opprobrium on the writer when they fall victim to the ‘typosetter’. ‘Public’ is one of those.

If there is one lesson that can be gleaned from this, it is the peril you put yourself in by committing absolutely anything to print. Whether you miss a letter, insert a space, or simply condense a phrase to a Carry-On level of lewdness, the scope for error, humiliation, ambiguity and outright offence is simply too wide to contemplate.

The linotype machine was apparently notorious at switching ‘i’ for ‘a’ and ‘u’. Hence the contender for most glorious misprint of all time when The Times reported on Queen Victoria’s opening of the Menai Bridge:

The Queen herself graciously pissed over the magnificent edifice.
The Times