Errata | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 13, 1872

Errata.

THERE are readers who are never happier, as mere readers, than when they light upon a typographical error in their favorite author or journal. No beauty in the blemished page gives quite so much of a certain kind of satisfaction as the blemish itself, for that enables the reader to rise for a moment superior to the writer, however learned, brilliant, or graceful he may be. The reader seems to have the impression, more or less vague, that he is himself an exceedingly clever fellow, and straightway sends a note to the editor, pointing out the error that was in his last issue. Every journalist knows this kind of a note, and has dropped hundreds of such missives, half read, into his waste paper basket, for it is only people unfamiliar with types who think it worth their while to make an ado about an inverted letter or a misplaced comma.

Typographical perfection is impossible even in works slowly and carefully prepared. It is unreasonable to demand it in a newspaper, the writing and printing of which are naturally done in haste. The wonder is, that there are so few mistakes. Let readers reflect for a moment that every letter on this page is produced by a separate piece of metal, so small that only the most skillful fingers can handle it dexterously. The slightest displacement of one of these slender strips of lead would inevitably cause a blunder. How easy it is to drop a type, or misplace, or dent it. Even after the proof-reader has corrected his proof sheet, all the chances, and a hundred others, are possible. In correcting one error in the types, it is easy for the compositor to disarrange a word in another part of the next.

Then, proof-readers are mortal. There is nothing easier in this world—lying not excepted—than not to see a misprint until it is too late to amend it, and then the blunder that escaped the keenest eye always has the faculty of becoming the most prominent thing on the page, and making the proof-reader wonder how in the world it escaped him. An author or proof-reader may revise and revise, and at the end find that he has overlooked some serious flaw. Then, again, in “making up” a form, the printer may let a type fall out, and in replacing it, he may put it in the wrong place—or again, he may not notice its absence, and then a blank is left. This is true of books as well as newspapers. There has never yet been produced a volume of any considerable size, free from typographical blemishes.—Every Saturday.