Thursday May 20, 2010

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We hope you enjoy this musing by Ralph Milton on mistakes.

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Mistakes - The Printer's Devil

I never make mistakes.

Sure, I sometimes invent a few creative variations that drive editors and proofreaders wild. But errors? Never!

Mistakes, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. I never notice any mistakes so I don't make any.

This tradition of literary creativity has a long history. In 1561, a racy little volume of 172 pages called Missae ac Missalis Anatomia was printed with 15 pages of errata.

The pious monk who wrote this little book explained that the devil hated his work so much, that in the middle of the night, Old Nick had relieved himself on the manuscript, making the ink run and therefore difficult to read. Which gave rise to the tradition of the "printer's devil." This tradition holds that no matter how hard you try, the first thing you will notice when the book comes off the press is a glaring error. This is especially true if you are either the publisher or the author.

"Not so!" proclaimed Foulis, the famed 18th-century Glasgow publishers. "We will produce the perrrfect book. Without errrorrr." Only the Scots would dream of producing a book which would be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. That a book should first of all be interesting and worth reading is not an argument they consider relevant.

Six experienced proofreaders were employed who went over every dot and tittle (Does anyone know what tittles are?) of this absolutely error-free book Foulis set out to publish. Then they posted the galleys in the hallowed halls of Glasgow U. with a reward of £50 to anyone who could find an error.

When they finally released this perfect book they found an error on the first line of the first page.

Murphy may be Irish, but he lives in Glasgow. And in Winfield, B.C.

Years ago when the tiny, neophyte publishing house called Wood Lake Books produced its very first book, The Gift of Story by yours truly, I set the type myself and then commandeered a group of women from St. Paul's United Church to proofread the book. The theory was that even though none of them were professional proofreaders, if enough of them went through the blessed thing, they should find all the mistakes.

It's not a theory that works out in practice. For one thing, whenever you correct a mistake, you have a very good chance of making another. This was in the olden days before computers, when you had to retype the whole line, sometimes the whole paragraph, to correct one spelling error.

When we had flailed away at the book till we were all sick and tired of it, I decided to declare it corrected. But that night I thought it would be only proper to thank the women who had worked so hard to find my many mistakes.

So I typed a paragraph in the foreword thanking the "profreaders."

From Angels in Red Suspenders by Ralph Milton

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