13 Comments

Obsession

About a digression

Leads to depression

‘Tis a lesson

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I do love an erratum slip.

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I mean, if you’ve published a cookbook one of whose recipe ingredients is inadvertently poisonous or explosive—at least one hopes it’s inadvertently—sure, let’s do an erratum slip, why not.

But this is just…bonkers!

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It's utterly trivial, must have been a complete nuisance to many people to handle, and is absurd. And, as I stare meditatively at my navel, what I find myself trying to parse regarding my character and personality is why I find it so charming. I think it's the paper quality? It looks luscious. And the typeface. If it were less pretty, there's no way I'd find it anything but, frankly, stupid. To wind up my comment which may, by now, exceed the word count of your original post: I'm as shallow as ever and forever charmed by a pretty (type)face.

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PPS is most def true

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I increasingly think it’s true that it’s true, and I just went in and puttered around with the copy to reflect that.

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So did you intentionally throw that “Rutland” hand grenade into the Shakespeare debate? I have never paid much attention, but this sounds like real evidence.

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Indeed: the ardour paedantic aesthetic.

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'Tis a mystery. I'm inclined, like you, to think the proposed erratum is itself an erratum.

I also wonder, given how uncommon the form "triology" is these days (I think one could infer from the appearance of the print that this is not a tremendously old volume), why the author chose to use it rather than the more usual "trilogy". Perhaps he or she was showing off, or being playful… or trying to trick the overly pernickety (forgive me, I'm British) reader into thinking he or she had caught an egregious error.

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Fascinating, but I think it unlikely a library erratum slip would be printed on matching paper in a matching typeface. This must be the publisher’s incorrect correction.

Also noteworthy, I've seen publisher errata that did not bother to match paper or typeface.

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See next thrilling installment!

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I favor your last hypothesis in the P.P.S. This little erratum note reminds me of the comments I have made on my current proofreading job. The publisher is compiling a whole bunch of pamphlets about the American colonists' growing rebellion, written by Britons in the 1770s, and I keep running into words that at first seem misspelled unintentionally (and therefore should be corrected), but once I do a little digging, they are often archaic or obscure. And sometimes I just can't tell—hence the comments I have to insert. I love learning this stuff, and love this photo.

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Late to these comments but the erratum slip put me in mind of an incident, when I was a small town librarian, in which we received a large slip to add to a new cookbook, warning that the "edible flowers" contained in one recipe were actually poisonous, and should not be consumed. So, what Benjamin alluded to below as a supposition, did indeed occur!

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