Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Oops I Did It Again - Editing Errors in a Pre-Digital Print World
1 Plays3 seconds ago
We are joined by writer and Art History instructor, Rachel Churner to talk about the intriguing realm of reprints in a pre-online world. Host Ben Miller and Churner discuss the Yale University Library's “Beauties of My Style” exhibition in one of our most fascinating episodes yet!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Personal Anecdotes
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques. I'm Ben Miller. I think we are overdue for a book episode. It's been, think about a year since we learned about the Naval Code book at the Independent Seaport Museum.
00:00:27
Speaker
And you know what? I like to read. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you, dear listener, also like to read. Now I don't know if you're like this, but I will confess one of my guilty pleasures is finding typos in a book.
00:00:42
Speaker
This probably doesn't speak well of me as a person, but I do genuinely get a little flash of joy when I spot a mistake that got past the editor. So imagine my excitement when I heard about exhibition at my alma mater.
00:00:58
Speaker
in the Yale Library, all about errata.
Yale Library Exhibition Overview
00:01:02
Speaker
now errata, of course, is a fancy Latin word for mistakes. And this exhibition focuses on the fascinating history of mistakes and corrections in the world of printing.
00:01:14
Speaker
The exhibition is called Beauties of My Style, Errata and the Printed Mistake. It's open now until November 29th, and it's curated by Rachel Turner of The New School and Jack Kaplan of Yale.
00:01:28
Speaker
This exhibition is chock full of just fascinating and weird and downright funny mistakes from the history of publishing. But the exhibition isn't just about mocking editors' mistakes. It's it's actually a careful reflection on a centuries-old tradition of unorthodox communication between printers and readers.
Deep Dive: The Wicked Bible
00:01:49
Speaker
So I'm delighted to be talking today with Rachel Turner. Welcome to Curious Objects. Thanks so much. Our curious object today comes from this exhibition, and it's a copy of the infamous Wicked Bible of 1631, which, in a big win for polyamory, instructs its readers, thou shalt commit adultery. But before we get to that, I have some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?
00:02:14
Speaker
Sure. What's the first object or artwork you remember falling in love with? Oh, um it would have been definitely something with Kirchvitter's collages from from that Weimar moment.
00:02:32
Speaker
What's the most valuable work of art you've ever touched? o An Agnes Martin huge painting that I got to inspect the the reverse of to see if there were any signatures or marks or even fingerprints. It my first ah moment with the the blue light on a painting was fascinating.
00:02:54
Speaker
Oh, and what did you find? Well, we found not only ah hand prints, but also some ah urine stains that may have been caused by a cat. You know, what sort of fascinating things that you wanted to unsee, but were really beautifully ah visible underneath that light.
00:03:12
Speaker
What's the coolest discovery you've made about art history? I really like um getting to go through archives and figuring out kind of what what works with archives. And one of the coolest things was that when I was working with a gallery called Peter Freeman years ago, we did a Marcel Broters exhibition um that included a live parrot that that spoke.
00:03:35
Speaker
And what was amazing is this this work was from the 70s and the parrot was still alive because parrots live so
Rachel's Artistic Journey & Insights
00:03:41
Speaker
long. And I love the idea that we were exhibiting this object as um you know as a and living animal that could still present the work.
00:03:50
Speaker
Oh, wow. That is actually very cool. Okay, you are banned from your current field. You have to pick a totally new job. What's it going to be? Chemistry. Chemistry, no kidding. Yeah.
00:04:01
Speaker
Does that mean you're you're going to sort of finesse the question by becoming an art conservator? I mean, that would be good. I could do that. But really, I just want to be, you know, lab. Wow, okay.
00:04:12
Speaker
I love how quickly you had that answer at hand. If you could open a gallery in any place and at any time period, when and where would it be?
00:04:25
Speaker
I would open a gallery in the 60s, probably maybe like a Dusseldorf gallery in the 60s. There were amazing artists there. There was a lot to think about in a post-war German context um and and colleagues there. So, yeah.
00:04:46
Speaker
that might be That might be the place. Cool. So what is the one piece that you regret not buying when you had the chance? That's stumper, because there's many. i haven't purchased as much as I wish I could have. um But I would have really loved to buy of Fluxus art, like Flux kits and things
Dream Exhibitions & Research
00:05:10
Speaker
like that. They really weren't so expensive not too long ago, and those I think would be really amazing to have. Yeah.
00:05:17
Speaker
What is the most unexpected place where you've found something extraordinary? Streets of Brooklyn. There's always really good things. um I remember one object in particular was this um cast concrete sculpture of a three-headed cat, but the heads the heads were on top of each other. ooh was just this bizarre object that someone had discarded. and um Yeah, it's it's so still with me. wow i love I love your repping the streets of Brooklyn as a fellow. brook and i have to say, yeah, if I were to retire tomorrow, I think I'd spend all weekend just wandering the streets of Park Slope looking for a for curb finds.
00:06:00
Speaker
There's treasures to be had. If you could curate an exhibition with no constraints, budgetary or otherwise, you you can have any venue you want, any loans you want.
00:06:12
Speaker
what would it be? I would have said before this exhibition, um you know, some incredible art exhibition, you know, I want to get like all, I want to bring all together institutional critique artists and have these huge build outs and do these amazing things.
00:06:31
Speaker
Now, i think I would want to do something that really does more and more and more of the Beinecke's holdings. They are amazing. And it's so fun to go through them. so Biggest, best, you know enormous exhibition with lots of research lead time um using their collection.
00:06:51
Speaker
Awesome. God, that would be such a treat. um What is the most unusual source that you've turned to for research, maybe for this exhibition or or maybe for something else?
00:07:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for this exhibition, we ended up looking at, and I think, you know, one of these will come up, like things like shipping guides. And so then trying to figure out like, how did shipping guides work? um You know, just maybe unusual for for the art historian field, right? Where I'm trying to figure out like, well what how did freight get from one place to another? And what would it mean to kind of um change our route and things like that?
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, logistics. We needed you during ah during COVID. yeah What was the last object or of art that you saw that made your pulse race? I am absolutely enamored with the Marcel Duchamp exhibition at MoMA right now. It is outstanding. And it's outstanding because, yes, you're seeing things like Elasho Oku that you don't see you know in person often, sure.
00:07:56
Speaker
But they also have this collection from the estate of objects that he had created, sometimes just little labels, sometimes maquettes of the fountain, urinal, et cetera, for the books.
00:08:10
Speaker
And
Institutional Collections & The Wicked Bible's Legacy
00:08:11
Speaker
they're just this... really absolutely like heart stopping moment of seeing an artist work through this idea of, you know, reproduction and manufacture and hand crafting something, right? So to take the fountain, make your tiny miniature in all of these different little paper mache models, and then have that manufactured. i just think it's absolutely stunning. Awesome. Awesome.
00:08:39
Speaker
Last question. What's one question about a book that you have never been able to answer, but wish you could? I mean, one question that I think is sort of still coming into play, something that we've we we're talking about before we started, you know, is just how objects get placed in collections, right? And so I think this is this for lots of books, right? that And it's you could do it, the provenance of of artworks is um sometimes easier to track, right? But I get really fascinated by how um how books end up in the institution, right? Do they just, you know, you've got a collection, you've got a collector, he donates a whole group.
00:09:18
Speaker
what makes a certain um a certain book kind of rise to the to the top here of something like, let's you know take the Wicked Bible, why did it get to Yale, how? um We're not completely sure. And that I think is really fascinating. Yeah.
00:09:34
Speaker
Okay. And we're going to dive into that in just a moment.
00:09:40
Speaker
We will be right back with Rachel Turner. ah First, as always, I like to say a quick thank you for listening. and We couldn't do this podcast without you listeners. If you're enjoying these conversations about the stories behind Curious Objects, there are a couple of things you can do to help.
Listener Engagement & Printing Errors
00:09:59
Speaker
First, You can subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or something else. It is the best way to make sure that you catch every new episode as it comes out.
00:10:13
Speaker
ah Second, if you have a moment, please leave us a rating and a review. That helps new listeners to discover the show. And I always like to hear what you enjoy about it.
00:10:24
Speaker
And if you know of a curious object that you'd like for us to talk about here, please get in touch. You can reach me via email at ben at curiousobjects.nyc.
00:10:36
Speaker
Or you can find me on Instagram at curiousobjects.nyc. I'm always on the lookout for our next story.
00:10:48
Speaker
Now, today's curious object is a copy of the 1631 King James Bible, which is famously known as the Wicked Bible. And for those who haven't encountered this particular book, Rachel, could you describe for us the the Bible and the specific erratum that gave it this name?
00:11:10
Speaker
Absolutely. So to tell the story briefly, in 1631, Robert Barker and Martin Lewis, who were the king's printers, published an authorized version of the Holy Bible in which the seventh commandment reads, thou shalt commit adultery. so It's a spectacular typo. The blunder was enormous and the printers were hauled before the court. They lost their license for a time. The books were recalled. Most were destroyed.
00:11:35
Speaker
Now, scholars at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have done really impressive work researching the Wicked Bible that's in their collection. And they've noted, ah interestingly and and recently, right that the printers didn't lose their business entirely as a result of the mistake, which is pretty remarkable. um It's also remarkable that any copies of this uncorrected Bible exist. um Estimates vary on how many remain, and and until 2022, it was generally assumed fewer than 10 wicked Bibles survived.
00:12:07
Speaker
But we know now, again, thanks to the University of Canterbury, that at least 25 copies are extant, 18 of which are held in institutional collections. Right. So there are still a handful that are in private hands and maybe even more that just aren't aren't known yet.
00:12:23
Speaker
um And it's sort of amazing to think about the survival of those copies. I mean, today it's sort of a gag, right? Oh, you know, thou shalt commit adultery. It's hilarious. And it is actually hilarious. But, you know, in 1631, it wasn't really a laughing matter, was it? Not at all. No, um it was ah a very serious matter. and They were you know called before ah the court of high commission about you know to review religious printing. it was yeah It was incredibly significant. They were fined quite a bit as well.
00:12:57
Speaker
So the copies that have survived, when you hold that or look at it, is is there anything about it to indicate its wickedness other than that that one typo?
00:13:07
Speaker
No, it doesn't look different at all. And I think that's part of maybe what makes it so unsettling. um In fact, for the the copy that's at the Beinecke, the only thing that calls attention to it, because it does not have a correction, you know,
Role of Errata in Publishing
00:13:23
Speaker
had meant to be destroyed, is that um someone has gone in and and handwritten a carrot with the word not in ink, you know, where it should be. And I just I love this idea because you can just feel that someone at some point like simply couldn't leave it as it was. like It was just too egregious to to hold. And this is a little tiny gesture of piety that travels across. That's amazing. The thing that is probably most remarkable about this object, though, is just how small the type is. The Bible is quite um small, but the the lead type itself is absolutely minuscule. And so think when we look at it now, it's really impossible to imagine a typesetter filling the form with this really, really tiny type and and not making other errors. I mean, to me, it seems like so many errors would have been made working at this scale. yeah
00:14:19
Speaker
Well, I'm just picturing you know my high school teacher going in to my yeah term essay and putting in those little carrots and Xs and things. yeah but But doing that to the to the King James Bible is really another level.
00:14:35
Speaker
So tell me, yeah I mean, there's there's this theory that I've heard that this wasn't actually just a sort of an innocent mistake, but that there was actually some kind of deliberate sabotage involved, maybe from a rival printer. Is that just an old wives' tale or is there something to it?
00:14:57
Speaker
I, you know, it's a great story and it even has a named suspect. The rival printer was named Bonham Norton. He had commercial motives um because to print the Bible in England, you needed a royal license and destroying Barker's reputation was a quick way to obtain it.
00:15:15
Speaker
um But there is very little evidence that there was sabotage. And most significantly, I think, is the fact that Barker never made the accusation of sabotage in court. Instead, he blamed his own workers and their incompetence. Right.
00:15:31
Speaker
Classic a boss tactic. Disappointing, right? It turns out to be quite common. I mean, the other thing about the sabotage theory that's interesting is that it works well with the marketing of the Wicked Bible, because that name only got attached to the book in the 1850s, when an antique book dealer decided, I have this object. um We're in the Victorian age. You know, it is thus wicked. um Now, I mean, I will say that the story of it being a purposeful mistake is so good that I almost want to believe it. um
00:16:06
Speaker
But it does seem more likely, particularly given the size of the print, you know, that the knot was simply dropped accidentally. um Interestingly enough, it was around this time that the courts stopped using guilty, not guilty, and switched to guilty, innocent, precisely because that knot was a sort of slippery character. Interesting.
00:16:27
Speaker
And I mean, are there other typos scattered throughout the the book? Or is it really just this one glaring mistake? Some copies have um another typo um that that we haven't confirmed is in the copy that we have. So there's, you know, so one other egregious error, but for the most ah part, it's quite clean, which is another reason maybe that the conspiracy theory works so well, because it's It's hard to believe yeah it wouldn't be real. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like, I can imagine, you know, mixing up the Hezekiah and Ezekiel or something. Or or dropping the word thee somewhere or thou. But, like, that's a that's a doozy.
00:17:10
Speaker
And if that's yeah really, like, one of the only or even the only actual typo in the entire text, and it feels like more than a coincidence, doesn't it Stakes are high, yeah.
00:17:23
Speaker
So um was it during the Victorian period that this became a sort of a collectible object, thanks to that nomenclature the Wicked Bible? It sounds like it. You know, that's um sort of what, when it first at least becomes an object of, you know, of curiosity, um and then they start to find them.
00:17:43
Speaker
um I think there were so few before. Yeah, well, and i as you say, they they they were all meant to be destroyed. So you know I sort of wonder of the ones that survived, how many survived through just accidents? mean, every time there's a product recall, of course, there are a lot of products that never are successfully recalled.
00:18:04
Speaker
ah or or whether there was anyone who was actually intentionally keeping those misprinted Bibles in the 17th century as a kind of, I don't know what, an act of irreverence.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, I would imagine there were both, right? You know, there's got to be folks who wanted to hold on to it. Now, um we're talking about errata, and...
00:18:28
Speaker
When I think of errata, I usually think of these lists, you know, list of of corrections that get stuck in the back of ah of a book.
00:18:39
Speaker
That's obviously today, that's a very old fashioned sort of obsolete method and in the age of digital printing. But that's sort of the context in which I've come across errata. And we're going to talk about a lot of different kinds of errata that are represented in the exhibition beyond just these these lists. But to start with that traditional idea of the errata list, you know how did you come across that or or or alight upon the errata list as the concept for an exhibition?
00:19:10
Speaker
Well, my co-curator, Jeff Kaplan, and I are... deeply invested in books because Jeff, as well as being a professor Yale, is also a graphic designer and I'm an editor and together we run Place Press. And so as publishers, you know we have learned that mistakes inevitably creep into print despite
Errata in Digital vs. Historical Publishing
00:19:30
Speaker
everyone's best efforts, no matter how hard you try. And so part of it was thinking about ways in which Other publishers have dealt with mistakes you know through in the past. And I think we became drawn to errata slip because it's got this beautifully standardized form, 4X, read Y. And once we started pulling them, you know we started to find all of this unexpected poetry that arises from the format.
00:20:00
Speaker
um sometimes just you know through the the words themselves. But what we also really started becoming excited about right was the ways in which these erratus sheets were not just spaces for corrections, but they were also you know sites for humor, for legal maneuvering, and reinterpretation even of published texts. And so we were really excited by how these small kind of overlooked additions to books could reshape meaning and authority in ways that felt urgent. um So Thomas Moore standardized the errata format as early as 1529.
00:20:38
Speaker
We have one of his books in the show. And you know the format he set out has really barely changed in 500 years. It's page number, line number, mistake, correction.
00:20:49
Speaker
And what that suggests to us is that the errata list gives us a glimpse into how books were made and how they maintained a relationship with readers, the fact that this format has has stayed with us.
00:21:02
Speaker
So I just called it obsolete, but was that was that wrong? is does it Does that traditional technique still have a role and in modern publishing? It's a much reduced role, i agreed. um And I think it changes, you know, but the way the digital publishing works changes it significantly.
00:21:22
Speaker
There are still books um that come... with errata slips. And I think there is a sort of interest in in making um corrections visible, but agreed, it's it's quite rare.
00:21:35
Speaker
Now, the whole idea of an errata list is to to sort of give a bit of homework to the reader um to say, you know here is here are the things that you need to look at or be aware of to make this book what it was supposed to be.
00:21:52
Speaker
Do you see that as ah sort of changing the nature of the relationship between the the author and the reader? Absolutely. um You know, one of the things that we are so excited about with the errata is that um it's a part of a book that makes the process of production knowledge visible. So, you know, everything else, the editing, the typesetting back and forth between an author and a proofreader, that's hidden from the final product. But in the errata, it surfaces um and it reveals printing as a kind of collective endeavor. And
00:22:28
Speaker
In that way, it does um change the relationship or at least acknowledge the relationship between the author and reader. um You know, it early erratalists often exhorted the reader to make corrections in the book.
00:22:44
Speaker
of really saying, like, please go through and and mark these errors. um But they also often contained um an invocation of patience, you know, to the dear reader, acknowledging that that not all the mistakes would be caught, and encouraging readers to find and mark additional errors that they noticed. I hope my ah podcast listeners are paying close attention to this.
00:23:08
Speaker
yeah So what we see in that, though, is this kind of remarkable transfer of authority, right? The errata suggests that the printed book isn't complete without the reader. um And one of my favorite examples in the show is that we have one book in which a particularly, i mean, we could say diligent, we could say persnickety reader has added their own corrections by hand to the errata list, right? Not to the book itself, but they've gone to the trouble of placing them in the
00:23:39
Speaker
order, slipping them in between the lines um to sort of say, you know, I'm going to assume the formal conventions here, even though this is is my own book. Wow.
00:23:49
Speaker
ah So I want to talk about another example from this exhibition, which is actually interesting to me. it's a It's a map, which is not something you think of it as having like, you know, quote unquote typos.
00:24:02
Speaker
um But this piece is called The Mariner's Mirror. And I wonder if you could tell me about that piece and and why it's in the exhibition. Sure. the The Mariner's Mirror was 16th century English translation of ah of a Dutch sea atlas. It's 1588.
00:24:23
Speaker
And it was a collection of nautical charts, as you mentioned. um And what is so incredible about it is on the one hand, it is this absolutely gorgeous object. It's got these luscious full spread color maps. It's got rotating dials. It really gorgeous.
00:24:42
Speaker
But also it opens with, quote, an author's admonition to the reader. um that justifies its mistakes on the vagary of the sea, which is this kind of preemptive errata that we found very remarkable. What we call ah cover your ass. Exactly. But it also implies right that mistakes are natural. They can't be sort of fully controlled in a way. um And it also right makes sure that no one can can call you out on things.
00:25:11
Speaker
But is there any particular mistake that that sort of came up in this in these charts that caused cause problems or could have caused problems?
00:25:22
Speaker
The page that we've opened to um has mistakes in the sense of, you know, it is mapping the the edge kind of of a landmass where, according to Lorde, there were you know shipwrecks because the rocks weren't in that position in the area. So there were real consequences to these things, yeah.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's funny. That seems like such a higher stakes error than leaving out the word not and in one of the Ten Commandments.
00:25:55
Speaker
And yet, obviously, much more was made out of the immorality of the Wicked Bible than shipwrecks resulting from misprinted masks. It's true. There's another um another sort of interesting document you've included, which is a Wells Fargo shipper's guide.
00:26:12
Speaker
and that's, again, it's a sort of different kind of errata from what what I would normally think about. So tell me about why you've included that in the show. ah So the Wells Fargo directory is from 1882. It's a shipper's guide to um you know, for mainly the the west of the United States. um So it you know it lists the best way to get freight from Hot Creek, Nevada to like Yolo, California. um And it does this by just listing out in endless tables, pages and pages of tables, you how to ship and what stations to use.
00:26:52
Speaker
What's interesting about the book is there is errata at the front of the book that has a handful of corrections. But what we highlighted in the exhibition is this tiny slip of paper on page 68 that's been pasted over the route for Howard's California.
Errata as Tools for Censorship & Knowledge Creation
00:27:09
Speaker
And it's literally a a sliver of a sheet that someone has reprinted, hand cut, hand glued into each copy. um And it shows, you know, the route has changed. So the old entry is covered, the new one replaces it.
00:27:25
Speaker
um but it doesn't try to who seamlessly um correct the mistake in a way because it's only glued on one edge. So it's this kind of little flap.
00:27:37
Speaker
um And when I think about that is that even there, and that's why we saw it kind of as as an errata, part of the errata list, is that it's a kind of public performance of accountability, right? Even in that little little moment. um it's It's still kind of showing us that something has changed.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating. And it sounds to me exactly like how Wikipedia works, where, you know, when a page is edited, you can go back if you want and see the whole history of edits and what's been changed over time and and corrected over time. But this is, you know, 150 years Yeah. So,
00:28:16
Speaker
before that yeah so Tell me about the little bit about the physical process. So you know in the case of the Wicked Bible, you talked about these tiny little letters that are set by hand, and it you know obviously...
00:28:33
Speaker
They're also set backwards, and so it's very easy to overlook something or make a mistake. Then there are cases like with this Wells Fargo guide, which where a whole page might be reprinted everything in between. What does the sort physical environment look like for errata over the centuries between when we start in the 1500s up until the and 20th centuries? Yeah, I mean, a lot changes with printing and the speed of printing itself. Right. And so one of the things that was exciting for me was that we were able to include an example of a mid run print correction from 17th century.
00:29:23
Speaker
Why that's so interesting. So, you know, as you're printing, um the page comes off the press and a compositor um would often read that, read a page every, you know, every handful of pages just to see how things were going. um And if a mistake was found, it was rare, but it could be corrected then and there if it was deemed necessary. So you would go back, the type would be reset, the press would start sorts for a moment and the pages would rerun.
00:29:53
Speaker
But because paper was so expensive, because printing itself was so valuable, you know those books didn't get destroyed. The pages that were errored, that had errors, didn't get pulped. And so we have a copy, two copies, i of have a book called Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco ah that's from one them has the mistake that and one of them has the mistake And um one of them has been corrected in this kind of stop press change.
00:30:23
Speaker
But what's also kind of beautiful is the errata issued at the end and says some copies have these errors and others do not. And it kind of leaves it up. It acknowledges that like within one edition of a book,
00:30:34
Speaker
Things aren't always the same. That I think is very interesting because that changes you know significantly as printing becomes um faster, larger, you know that you don't really have those types of changes mid run.
00:30:48
Speaker
I mean, that's the kind of errata that feels very intimate to me. You know, ah like a conversation between the printer and the reader that's disarming. It's it's sort of refreshing.
00:31:02
Speaker
yeah I don't know. it It feels much more accessible and sociable than a traditional kind of printing. Agreed. And I think it gives a you know, it was a really good way for us to sort of understand the you how early books were received and and how they were still kind of works in process.
00:31:22
Speaker
I was really interested when I started to read about your your exhibition in the ways that errata have been used with a purpose. um And one of the themes that comes up is ah censorship and satire.
00:31:40
Speaker
and how errata was actually used as a tool to kind of say things that weren't really acceptable ah or weren't strictly legal.
00:31:51
Speaker
How was that done? How how could a printer use errata to communicate ah an illicit message like that? One of the ways to do it,
00:32:02
Speaker
would be, and again, this is maybe the pseudo-erata, the preface version. For example, in Copernicus's On the Revolutions, um the book was kind of corrected in a sense um because when it was printed in 1543,
00:32:20
Speaker
and There was an anonymous preface by the publisher that was attached that simply reframed the whole work as hypothesis. right So it went from being scientific study to simply one man's theory. um The other way that I think the errata formally, that that formal slip really plays out is with um Satire, for example, and I think nothing really compares to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's pamphlet addresses to the people from 1795. And in this pamphlet, he condemns the English war with France. um And he includes a mock orrotum note that reads page 61 for murder, read fight for the king and country.
00:33:09
Speaker
Oh, wow. And it's really, a really stunning kind of um political argument, right? Tucked there so that... um the sensors wouldn't be able to get around it, but also because it's a doubling down, right?
Digital Publishing's Transparency Challenges
00:33:25
Speaker
It's a real way of making the sarcasm just devastating. Yeah, like this wasn't an accident. I wrote it this way and I meant it this way. Exactly. Even if the words themselves say the opposite. That's really remarkable.
00:33:40
Speaker
and And sometimes it's just a matter of sort of wit and whimsy, right? Do you do you have ah an example of an author who used errata as ah a kind of a joke?
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, there's this beautiful um example. It's an anonymous publication called Stu and Bayes from from 1670. And what I like a lot about it, and it's perhaps less of a joke, but more of this kind of um disclaimer, right? It's a way of like, because one of the things we were interested in how do you deflect blame?
00:34:19
Speaker
ah or take responsibility through this format. And you know a lot of them say, oh, I'm so sorry I made these mistakes. you know or But this one says, by reason of these authors being in the country, these errata have happened. And I just love that syntax. The mistakes just happened. We were out of town. i don't know you know. It doesn't particularly blame anyone. um The lists themselves were actually sometimes called Faults escaped. Oh, wow. Which I also really love, right? They just sort of floated there. They floated out of the book. um
00:34:55
Speaker
So in that way, you know, i think there are some really beautiful moments. And then there were some um authors who simply you know would create whole lists of mistakes that that weren't there, that were really kind of, this was almost like making a poem out of an errata.
00:35:14
Speaker
So, you know, I mentioned that... um Well, I use the word obsolete, which you corrected me on and that errata are in fact still used in some circumstances today.
00:35:27
Speaker
But by and large, the vast majority of digital publishers will just make the edit without making any note of it. And generally, there's no record. There's no way to go back and see that there was once an error, which has since been fixed.
00:35:43
Speaker
So with the exception of a handful of of publications that will note their corrections, and as I mentioned, you know Wikipedia, we just don't have any way to trace back the history of mistakes in an online publication.
00:36:00
Speaker
So what would you say, if anything, is is lost in that? I think quite a lot is lost. i mean, I think we lose... First, you know accountability. So a public acknowledgement that says, yeah we told you something wrong.
00:36:15
Speaker
Here's the record of that mistake alongside the correction. i just The error happens, but now there's no acknowledgement of it and it just gets sort of seamlessly corrected.
00:36:27
Speaker
But it also, what the sort of correction of mistakes does is help us understand later what's important for a given moment in time. So one of the things we were able to do you know is to look back and see, okay, there were moments in in history where what was important would be um you know correcting the narrative of Sojourner Truth, right? Because if the story had been published during the Civil War versus post-Civil War, right, those those errors have different meanings, you know? So to know what they are and to understand how they're corrected, I think, is is critical. um I think we also lose...
00:37:10
Speaker
something you know so more subtle, but but that is um you know so a kind of ah point that we are very ah focused on in the show, which is again, this this visibility of the labor behind knowledge production. And the errata list makes mistakes visible thus reminding us that the written word is is not a given, right, but it's something we can participate in. It's something that we can push back against. um And I think it says, you know, printing is a collective exercise. um
00:37:43
Speaker
The self-edit to me implies that, you know, this is simply given on high. you You accept what you're what you're told. Yeah, it's an interesting kind of relationship with authority, isn't it? The idea of, i mean, taking responsibility for a mistake or even acknowledging the existence of a mistake feels somehow democratic.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah. Which may feel like a scarce commodity these days and all the more precious. Yeah. So i have to agree with you. It it it feels like even just the the formal process of noting those mistakes seems like a really important way of of kind of humanizing a publication and making it feel like a a conversation rather than, well, I don't know, tablets with commandments written on them.
Importance of Acknowledging Mistakes
00:38:31
Speaker
Agreed. Yeah. um You know, I think one of the things that we were really hoping that visitors would would take away from the show is just this idea that, you know, mistakes don't have to be um shunned or ignored or, ah you know, even downplayed, right? they're They're acceptable and sometimes even necessary because that's how knowledge is made. It's how it's revised. It's how it's contested.
00:38:55
Speaker
um You know, it's an argument for for honesty about how difficult it is to get things right and for the value of making that difficulty visible so that we can all see that it's a it's a process that has to be shared.
00:39:09
Speaker
For me, the the exhibition has really reinforced the how printing and you know by extension writing and publishing, et cetera, was and remains communals. One of the objects that did not make it into the show, but that I adore is a printer's manual from 1608 by Hieronymus Hornshue. And e he is the guy who gave us the proofreader marks that was still used today. um And he insists in the opening of this book that printing is an exercise in communal responsibility.
00:39:43
Speaker
Anyway, he's talking mainly about proofreading, okay, but I think that that insight applies really to to everything the exhibition contains, right? it It applies to the Wicked Bible, but also to like the map of Laos that we include that replaces French names with indigenous ones. You know, that it's... the ways in which these things, um in which meaning and authority can be negotiated. And so they're not handed down from on high, as you were saying, they aren't these tablets coming off the mountain, but they're arrived at collectively and they're thus collectively constructed and and able to be changed. And that for me is just a really exciting um thing to share.
00:40:24
Speaker
Well, and as we heard at the very top of this conversation, even those tablets coming off the mountain may have typos in them. so Exactly. got to be aware. yeah Well, I love the idea that mistakes are okay. I think that's a um that's a great, very comforting note to end on.
00:40:44
Speaker
So thank you so much, Rachel, for for talking with me today. Thank you. Again, the exhibition is Beauties of My Style, Errata and the Printed Mistake.
00:40:54
Speaker
It is open now until November 29th at the Sterling Library at Yale.
00:41:03
Speaker
Curious Objects is produced by Irvashi Lele. Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva. Support from the Magazine Intiques editorial team includes senior editor Stafford-Turner and managing editor Christine Hildebrandt.