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Dear Ed archive

July 2008

I've just found a typo on the first page of a book I edited. Will it haunt me forever?
Bruce

Dear Bruce

Sometimes I think all books should be stickered with a label that says 'This book contains one deliberate error'. Then everybody would be happy. The reader could relax, knowing there was only one error. The editor could relax, knowing the rest of the book was error-free. And then when the inevitable error is found, we could thank the observant reader for being so astute and bringing it to our attention. (Although such labels would also set loose a posse of pedants determined to prove that the declaration of one deliberate error was itself an error and thus proved that the book's central premise, be it Collecting Argyle Socks or Biofuel for Fun and Profit, was essentially flimsy.)

Sorry, I was distracted there for a moment. A cloud the shape of a poodle was being blown past my window. Now, where were we? Ah, yes: typos. I remember the first time I detected a typo. It was in a nativity play at Sunday School. I'd taken a quick squiz at the script during a break in rehearsals (cognisant that I would become an editor in decades to come), only to find that my role was 'shep.'. Not knowing much about abbreviations, I went home and told my family I was going to be a sheep in the nativity play and that my Sunday School teacher couldn't spell. Both of these assumptions turned out to be incorrect.

The worst typos are those that form words in their own right: fiend and friend, interstate and intestate, uniformed and uninformed, grid and gird. A recent Sunday Age article described Michael Jackson's chequered career as a 'pubic-relations disaster'. I wasn't sure when I read it whether it was a typo or a new bid for brutal honesty in journalism. Perhaps it was both.

If your typo is somewhere strikingly obvious, such as the spine, it can create so much confusion that your book will be unable to persuade readers to part with their money and take it home. The spine text on a how-to book in my local bookshop reads KITHCHENS AND BATHROOMS.

This could be because:

1. the editor confused 'kith and kin' with 'kitchen', as you do
2. the spine copy was keyed by the designer (and everybody knows that a book designer's spelling ability is in inverse proportion to their design skills)
3. text in capitals is hard to read.

I suspect it was c). Or should that be TEXT IN CAPITALS IS HARD TO READ? Just to prove my point, the same copy of KITHCHENS AND BATHROOMS has been sitting on the shelf unpurchased for years, getting sadder and grubbier.

Then there's the typo that has unexpected results. Years ago, a friend of mine named Clive moved to Gippsland and changed his address on the electoral roll. When polling day came around and Clive went to vote, he discovered that, courtesy of a bureaucratic typo, Clive Oatley had become Olive Catley.

All the bets (and all the best)...

Ed