In dealing with our own older literature we find a considerable difference in degree of typographical correctness; thus the old plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often marvels of inaccuracy, and while books of the same date are usually supplied with tables of errata, plays were issued without any such helps to correction. This to some extent is to be accounted for by the fact that many of these plays were surreptitious publications, or, at all events, printed in a hurry, without care. The late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps, in his curious privately printed volume (A Dictionary of Misprints, 1887), writes: ``Such tests were really a thousandfold more necessary in editions of plays, but they are practically non-existent in the latter, the brief one which is prefixed to Dekker's Satiro-Mastix, 1602, being nearly the only example that is to be found in any that appeared during the literary career of the great dramatist.''
In other branches of literature it is <p 81>evident that some care was taken to escape misprints, either by the correction of the printer's reader or of the author. Some of the excuses made for misprints in our old books are very amusing. In a little English book of twenty-six leaves printed at Douay in 1582, and entitled A true reporte of the death and martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite and Preiste, and M. Sherwin and M. Bryan Preistes, at Tiborne the first of December 1581, is this notice at the end:—
``Good reader, pardon all faultes escaped in the printing and beare with the woorkmanship of a strainger.''
Many of Nicholas Breton's tracts were issued surreptitiously, and he protested that many pieces which he had never written were falsely ascribed to him. The Bower of Delights was published without the author's sanction, and the printer (or publisher) Richard Jones made the following address ``to the Gentlemen Readers'' on the blunders which had been made in the book:—
``Pardon mee (good Gentlemen) of my presumption, & protect me, I pray you,<p 82> against those Cavellers and findfaults, that never like of any thing that they see printed, though it be never so well compiled. And where you happen to find fault, impute it to bee committed by the Printers negligence, then (otherwise) by any ignorance in the author: and especially in A 3, about the middest of the page, for LIME OR LEAD I pray you read LINE OR LEAD. So shall your poore Printer haue just cause hereafter to be more carefull, and acknowledge himselfe most bounden (at all times) to do your service to the utmost of his power. ``Yours R. J., PRINTER.''
A little scientific book, entitled The Making and use of the Geometricall Instrument called a Sector . . . by Thomas Hood, 1598, has a list of errata headed Faultes escaped, with this note of the author or printer:—
``Gentle reader, I pray you excuse these faults, because I finde by experience, that it is an harder matter to print these mathematicall books trew, then bookes of other discourse.'' <p 83>
Arthur Hopton's Baculum Geod<ae>ticum sive Viaticum or the Geodeticall Staffe (1610), contains the following quaint lines at the head of the list of errata:—
``The Printer to the Reader.
``For errours past or faults that scaped be,
Let this collection give content to thee:
A worke of art, the grounds to us unknowne,
May cause us erre, thoughe all our skill be showne.
When points and letters, doe containe the sence,
The wise may halt, yet doe no great offence.
Then pardon here, such faults that do befall,
The next edition makes amends for all.''
Thomas Heywood, the voluminous dramatist, added to his Apology for Actors (1612) an interesting address to the printer of his tract, which, besides drawing attention to the printer's dislike of his errors being called attention to in a table of errata, is singularly valuable for its reference to Shakespeare's annoyance at Jaggard's treatment of him by attributing to his pen Heywood's poems from Great Britain's Troy.