Printing Errors Celebrated in Upcoming Yale Library Exhibition

The first British edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the 'Wicked Bible' will be among the hundreds of printed mistakes and errata lists on view in a new exhibition opening at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library opening March 30.

From the late 15th century onward, printers and authors compiled lists of “faults escaped” or “errors committed,” often with justifications and apologies, which were added to books as either tipped-in slips or additional sheets at the end. Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake will feature a wide range of examples drawn from Yale Library Special Collections covering nearly half a millennium and alongside their companion texts.
 
The title of the exhibition derives from a statement by James Joyce shortly before the release of Ulysses: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” The exhibition focuses on 30 works including maps with inaccurate geographies and details, religious texts in which typographic errors were seized upon as proof of heresy, and mid-run book corrections reflecting textual variations within one edition.

Highlights include:

• the seven-page errata slip including more than 200 mistakes within the 1922 Ulysses, reflecting the challenge that it posed for Joyce's editors and proofreaders
• the notorious typographical error in the so-called 'Wicked Bible' printed in 1631 which read “Thou shalt commit adultery” and cost the printers their license - most of the 1,00-copy run was destroyed but in the copy from Yale Library’s collection the missing “not” has been added by hand
• a copperplate panorama from 1846 which compresses the 138 miles between New York and Albany into a single foldout strip for use as a guide for steamboat travelers - this copy includes an errata slip correcting a series of mistakes affecting travelers’ understanding of their vistas, including the mislabeling of towns and the inadvertent increase in the population of Fishkill Village to 11,000 from 800
• two copies of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) - in the first printing that appeared in 1543, an anonymous preface reframed and “corrected” the author’s heliocentric theory as a mere “hypothesis,” while the first Nuremberg edition listed 108 textual and diagrammatic errors
• Upton Sinclair’s first self-published edition of 100%: The Story of a Patriot which satirized the hysteria during the period of intense anticommunist fear in the United States after World War I - in this edition, the author mistakenly identified a founding member of the Communist Party of America as a government agent
• Ken Knabb’s translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) which was touted upon its release in 2004 as a “new authorized translation” from the French when in fact it was unauthorized, as the sliver of paper tucked into its pages makes clear

The exhibition runs at the Sterling Memorial Library’s Hanke Gallery until September 6.