Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History

293 Pages·2017·3.96 MB·English

by  Rebecca Romney

DEDICATION
Rebecca dedicates this book to Richard D. Altick and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
neither of whom would have entirely approved.
J.P. dedicates this book to the Ghost of a Flea, for being the coolest thing he’s
ever seen. He and Rebecca also dedicate it to Ellie and Kit, who are pretty cool,
too.
EPIGRAPH
Posterity it seems has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable
to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of
creativity.
—DORIS LESSING
Transgression is one of the historian’s most useful data, for the pointed figure of
the scandalized is often our index of the norm.
—JOSEPH LOEWENSTEIN
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION What Do You Reckon This Is?
CHAPTER 1 How to Forge a Rare Book
CHAPTER 2 Forgetting Mr. Gooseflesh
CHAPTER 3 Trees of Truth
CHAPTER 4 Making the Round World Flat
CHAPTER 5 Bad Shakespeare
CHAPTER 6 Benjamin Franklin Makes It Rain
CHAPTER 7 Angelic Visions and Deadly Terrors
CHAPTER 8 The Memoir That Killed Her Memory
CHAPTER 9 American Bookaneers
CHAPTER 10 When Doves Cry
CHAPTER 11 Blifter!
CONCLUSION Nothing More Deceptive than an Obvious Fact
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO YOU RECKON THIS IS?
THIS IS AN IRREVERENT HISTORY. Sure, to most of us, a history about the
printed word sounds dignified. After all, the printing press has recorded and
spread some of the greatest achievements of humankind. But remember,
humankind is also full of idiots. Ridiculous decisions, weird coincidences, and
absurd stories are no strangers to our species. The history of the printed word
reveals our capacity for brilliance, but it also reveals our capacity for blunder.
The printing press is a stage upon which the entire drama of human thought and
morality is acted out. At times that’s the delight of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of
Peter Rabbit; at others, it’s the adamantine weight of James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake. Sometimes the ideals are as enlightened as John Milton’s Areopagitica,
and at other times they’re whatever the hell Fifty Shades of Grey is.
Human civilization is all the richer for the bizarre history of printed books.
Our mistakes, our provocations, and our mysteries are all valuable in their own
ways. Our predecessors who lived hundreds of years ago are not so different
from us, and we can’t help but laugh in recognition of our shared folly. Take the
1631 printing of the Bible in English, the infamous “Sinners’ Bible.” The
printer, Robert Barker, owned the exclusive privilege to print Bibles in London.
His greatest triumph was the first edition of the King James Bible (1611). If
you’re able to find one today, you can expect to pay one hundred to two hundred
thousand dollars (or more) for it. Near the end of Barker’s career two decades
later, he produced one thousand copies of the Holy Book without a very close
proofread. While most typos are innocuous, others lead to trouble with the law.
In setting the type for Barker’s sinful Bible, a compositor somehow forgot a key
word in the seventh of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not commit
adultery” became “Thou shalt commit adultery.” When this “mistake” was
caught, Barker and a colleague were summoned to a legal hearing at the order of
King Charles I. They escaped with only a hefty fine, but copies of the Bible were
seized wherever they were found, and destroyed. Partially because of the
scarcity, today a copy of this “Wicked Bible” can fetch well into the tens of
thousands of dollars at auction. Modern collectors appear as amused by the error
as the the eighteenth-century owners who went out of their way to save their
copies for posterity.
People like to push, to test boundaries. Scandal and amusement are two of
the most glorious strands woven into the tapestry of the printed word. Take one
of the masterpieces of American children’s literature, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Published in 1885, Twain’s masterpiece has
everything a reader could ever want: adventure, humor, controversy, tenderness,
the hypocrisy of competing social class structures—and a penis.
Most people agree that exposed adult genitalia are not something you should
normally encounter in children’s literature. Yet according to the first printed
copies of Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Silas did not agree with most people. Mark
Twain didn’t intend his farmer/preacher character to be a sex offender, but in the
weird world of print, mistakes (or, in this case, pranks) happen. During the
printing, the innocent illustration of Uncle Silas was altered without Twain’s
knowledge to appear as if Silas were proudly displaying his erect phallus—a
phallus that, in order to pass unnoticed at a casual glance, had to be the size of a
mealworm.
THE INFAMOUS UNCLE SILAS ILLUSTRATION IN ITS THREE STAGES: THE “CURVED” FLY
(BEFORE), THE DEFACEMENT, AND THE “STRAIGHT” FLY (AFTER). Image used with the kind
permission of Kevin Mac Donnell Rare Books.
Despite a five-hundred-dollar reward (more than twelve thousand dollars in
today’s currency), we still don’t know exactly which of the fifty pressmen
working on Huckleberry Finn vandalized the printing plate. In the original
illustration, which depicts Huck Finn presenting himself in Uncle Silas’s home
as his distant nephew, Silas stands with his pelvis jutting out in an exclamation
of dramatic confusion. Aunt Sally hovers nearby with a half-smile, as if she
suspects what’s really going on. And young Huck has his hand on his hip,
thinking of how to respond to the old man’s line of questioning.
With a few scratches into a printing plate, however, the scene took on a
markedly different feel. In the altered sketch, Aunt Sally has a disturbing grin on
her face, Huck appears to be silently processing the obscenity, and Uncle Silas
looks an awful lot like he is gesturing to his tiny exposed member over a caption
that reads: “Who do you reckon it is?”
One might suppose that the “greatest American humorist” would have seen
the lighter side of this little printing debacle. Mark Twain did not. The famed
author immediately had the illustration stripped from all copies, and book agents
selling subscriptions door-to-door were ordered to tear out the page from their
display copy. Although no copies containing the hilariously offensive Uncle
Silas illustration made it into the hands of the public at large, some agents
inevitably bucked Twain’s orders, and the drawing ended up displayed in the
offices of a few publishers.
Fixing the penis debacle cost Twain a tremendous amount of money and
delayed the book’s release beyond the 1884 Christmas season. Today we read
the phrase “published in 1885” and don’t realize the small shit storm that
changed the book’s publication date from 1884. Modern rare book dealers
always note the state of Uncle Silas’s fly in their descriptions of the first-edition
copies of Huckleberry Finn, which sell for thousands of dollars.
We love exploring the darkly comic lining to history. Admittedly, this can
sometimes be a challenge. For example, here is an iconic line from
Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Notes from Underground: “I’m certain that man will
never renounce real suffering . . . why, this is the sole cause of consciousness.”
Russia is not a funny place. Just ask the Soviet-born comedian, Yakov Smirnoff:
“Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they
are there. They are dead, but they are there.” If Smirnoff can find humor in the
USSR, we figure finding humor in the history of the printed word can’t be that
hard, right? Whether it’s a fifteenth-century German inventor short on money or
a London engraver talking to ghosts three centuries later, people are people, and
part of being people is doing bat-shit crazy things.
Take that inventor from Mainz. Nearly everyone recognizes the name
Gutenberg, but what do we really know about him? Shockingly little. Gutenberg
may have invented the printing press in the West, but he didn’t print anything
about himself. In fact, for hundreds of years, the European inventor of one of
mankind’s greatest innovations was unknown to the world. In contrast to these
painful gaps in the historical record, we have a wealth of material about one
Johannes Trithemius, a Benedictine monk who campaigned against the new
invention of printing three decades after Gutenberg. Ironically, we know so
much about this obstinate monk because others printed his arguments against
printing. Who gets to determine how we are remembered after we are dust?
Contradictions like this come alive in the history of books. Gerardus
Mercator, a sixteenth-century Flemish mapmaker who coined the term atlas, is
the man responsible for making it possible to use a flat map to circumnavigate a
round globe. Yet he’s also responsible for generations of Europeans believing
the Arctic was dominated by a ring of four super islands inhabited by “Little
People.” Mercator added that tidbit on good authority, or so he believed.
When faced with a flood of information, misinformation, and conflicting
sources, how do you know what to trust? The books in front of us seem so pure
and pristine, but like the surface of a quiet lake, underneath those printed words
are murky depths. As with Gutenberg, most people know Shakespeare, but most
people don’t know that there are “bad” versions of his plays out there. Hamlet
may be one of the most eloquent characters of Western literature, but the earliest
printed version of Hamlet makes the Danish prince sound like a drunken pirate
at an English Christmas party: “To be, or not to be, Aye there’s the point.” When
you dive deeper, you start to wonder if we really know Shakespeare after all.
The world of print is full of ironies, too. Take the greatest translator of the
English Bible, William Tyndale, whose work made the Holy Book accessible to
countless worshipers for the first time—and who was burned at the stake for
heresy. Or think of the husband of the protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who
published a devoted memoir thinking it would ensure his wife’s reputation—
only to see it push her into public shame and obscurity for the next hundred
years. Who is allowed to speak as an authority when the printing press
democratizes power and encourages the widespread discussion of ideas?
The passions and foibles of human nature are exemplified in what we print
and why. Benjamin Franklin formed an empire of print that would go on to help
unite an emerging nation. (This empire also made him an ungodly amount of
money.) When the British Parliament levied a now-infamous tax on paper, they
didn’t realize that printers, with their ready-at-hand soapboxes, are the last
people you want to piss off. One adage was as true then as it is today: follow the