The Book-Hunter
ferocity, I shall just offer one amended reading, because there is
something in it quite peculiar, and characteristic of its literary
birthplace beyond the Atlantic. The passage operated upon is the wild
soliloquy, where Hamlet resolves to try the test of the play, and says--
"The devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me."
The amended reading stands--
"As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me too--damme."]
The quantity of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they
are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious
considerations. It may surely be believed that, between the compositors
who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing
of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care.
Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of
discovered printers' blunders. The inference from this, however, is not
that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not
worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is
of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like
those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has
been committed, but would never have left their privacy for the
detection of a petty fraud.
The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the
zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections
have occurred in minor literature,--as, for instance, when Akenside's
description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as "serenely great,"
was restored to "severely great." The reason, however, why such
detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one
that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words
is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another.
Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has
much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to
achieve--as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes
supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his
hand cannot accomplish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most
alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the
contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance
of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a
poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second
and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was
pronounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and
originality of the piece,--an opinion in which, unfortunately, the
author did not concur; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a
critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the
lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown
about.[31]
[Footnote 31: One curious service of printers' blunders, of a character
quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in
detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any
difficulty in critically determining the question, when the plagiarism
is so close as to admit of this test; but there are pieces of very hard
work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people
go through the same work, they will come to the same conclusion. In such
cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder,
as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some
thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire Bibliographique were
incorporated in the Siecles Litteraires de la France, "avec une
exactitude si admirable, qu'on y a precieusement conserve toutes les
fautes typographiques."]
There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printers' blunders in our
own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family:--
"When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses,
The nasty things printed it--freshly-blown noses."
Suchlike was the fatality which suddenly dried up the tears of those who
read a certain pathetic ode, in which the desolate widow was printed as
"dissolute;" and the accident which destroyed a poetic reputation by
making the "pale martyr in his sheet of fire" come forward with "his
shirt on fire." So also a certain printer, whose solemn duty it was to
have announced to the world that "intoxication is folly," whether
actuated by simplicity of soul or by malignity, was unable to resist the
faint amendment which announced the more genial doctrine that
"intoxication is jolly."[32]
[Footnote 32: See this and other cases in point set forth in an amusing
article on "Literary Mishaps," in Hedderwick's Miscellany, part ii.]
A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a
certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the
world to say that he had ever used a false quantity, or committed an
anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a
quotation from a Greek or Latin classic--to misquote an English author
is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not
guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, or left out a word in copying
the title-page of a volume; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent
analysis of its contents, mistake the number of pages devoted to one
head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all
carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the
most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a
sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the
same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circumlocution
to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity,
he little knew what a humiliation fate had prepared for him. It happened
to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his,
went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment,
when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an
intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with shipping-lists
than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what
had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all
pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting
the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise,
under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had
gone to sea in a _Canadian_ vessel. The victim of this calamity had
undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical
equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute of
the organ of veneration, thoughtlessly asked him about the last new
popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of,
and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to
him about the productions of a certain Charles Dickens. The "Canadian
vessel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was treated
accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a
judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an
unsuitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could
foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made
frequent inquiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what
continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his
spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not
unconscious of the merits of the peculiar class of books now under
consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to
reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be
known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the
notice of the book-fanciers. Consequences from printers' blunders of a
still more tragic character even than this, have been preserved--as for
instance, the fate of Guidi the Italian poet, whose end is said to have
been hastened by the misprints in his poetical paraphrase of the
Homilies of his patron, Clement XI.
An odd accident occurred to a well-known book lately published,
called Men of the Time. It sometimes happens in a printing-office that
some of the types, perhaps a printed line or two, fall out of "the
forme." Those in whose hands the accident occurs generally try to put
things to rights as well as they can, and may be very successful in
restoring appearances with the most deplorable results to the sense. It
happened thus in the instance referred to. A few lines dropping out of
the Life of Robert Owen, the parallelogram Communist, were hustled, as
the nearest place of refuge, into the biography of his closest
alphabetical neighbour--"Oxford, Bishop of." The consequence is that the
article begins as follows:--
"OXFORD, THE RIGHT REVEREND SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, BISHOP OF, was born in
1805. A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A
sceptic, as regards religious revelation, he is nevertheless an
out-and-out believer in spirit movements."
Whenever this blunder was discovered, the leaf was cancelled; but a few
copies of the book had got into circulation, which some day or other may
be very valuable.
From errors of the press there is a natural transition to the class who
incur the guilt of perpetrating them, and whose peculiar mental
qualities impart to them their special characteristics. That mysterious
body called compositors, through whose hands all literature passes, are
reputed to be a placid and unimpressionable race of practical stoics,
who do their work dutifully, without yielding to the intellectual
influences represented by it. A clause of an Act of Parliament, with all
its whereases, and be it enacteds, and hereby repealeds, creates, it is
said, quite as much emotion in them as the most brilliant burst of the
fashionable poet of the day. They will set you up a psalm or a
blasphemous ditty with the same equanimity, not retaining in their minds
any clear distinction between them. Your writing must be something very
wonderful indeed, before they distinguish it from other "copy," except
by the goodness or badness of the hand. A State paper which all the
world is mad to know about, is quite safe in a printing-office; and, if
report speak truly, they will set up what is here set down of them,
without noting that it refers to themselves. It is said that this stoic
indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity
of literature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under
the "stick," they might make dire havoc.
We are not to suppose, however, that they take less interest in, or are
less observant of, the work of their hands than other workmen. The point
of view, however, from which their observation is taken, is not exactly
the same as that of their co-operator, the author whose writing they set
up, nor is their notification of specialties of a kind which would
always be felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of
Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age,
is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted
the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The
exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of
the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that
the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight
of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who,
with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered a