``Et Rosette a v<e'>cu ce que vivent les roses;''
but forgetting ``to cross his tees'' the compositor made the fortunate blunder of printing rose elle, which so pleased the author that he let it stand, and modified the following lines in accordance with the printer's improvement.
Rabelais nearly got into trouble by a blunder of his printer, who in several places set up asne for <a^>me. A council met at the Sorbonne to consider the case against him, and the doctors formally denounced Rabelais to Francis I., and requested permission to prosecute him for heresy; but the king after consideration refused to give the permission. <p 147>Rabelais then laughed at his accusers for founding a charge of heresy against him on a printer's blunder, but there were strong suspicions that the misprints were intentional.
These misprints are styled by the French coquilles, a word whose derivation M. Boutney, author of Dictionnaire de l'Argot des Typographes, is unable to explain after twenty years' search. A number of Longman's Magazine contains an article on these coquilles, in which very many amusing blunders are quoted. One of these gave rise to a pun which is so excellent that it is impossible to resist the temptation of transferring the anecdote from those pages to these:—
``In the Rue Richelieu there is a statue of Corneille holding a roll in his hand, on which are inscribed the titles of his principal works. The task of incising these names it appears had been given to an illiterate young apprentice, who thought proper to spell avare with two r's. A wit, observing this, remarked pleasantly, Tiens, voil<a!> an avare qui a un air misanthrope (un r mis en trop).'' <p 148>
In a newspaper account of Mr. Gladstone's religious views the word Anglican is travestied as Afghan, with the following curious result: ``There is no form of faith in existence more effectually tenacious than the Afghan form, which asserts the full catholicity of that branch church whose charter is the English Church Prayer Book.''
In the diary of John Hunter, of Craigcrook, it is recorded that at one of the meetings between the diarist, Leigh Hunt, and Carlyle, ``Hunt gave us some capital specimens of absurd errors of the press committed by printers from his copy. One very good one occurs in a paper, where he had said, `he had a liking for coffee because it always reminded him of the Arabian Nights,' though not mentioned there, adding, `as smoking does for the same reason.' This was converted into the following oracular words: `As sucking does for the snow season'! He could not find it in his heart to correct this, and thus it stands as a theme for the profound speculations of the commentators.'' <p 149>
A very slight misprint will make a great difference; sometimes an unintelliglble word is produced, but sometimes the mere transposition of a letter will make a word exactly opposite in its meaning to the original, as unite for untie. In Jeremy Taylor's XXV. Sermons preached at Golden Grove: Being for the Winter half-year (London, 1653), p. 247, we read, ``It may help to unite the charm,'' whereas the author wished to say ``untie.''
The title of Cobbett's Horse-hoeing
Husbandry was easily turned into Horse-shoeing
Husbandry, that of the Holy Grail into
Holy Gruel, and Layamon's Brut into
Layamon's Brat.
A local paper, reporting the proceedings at the Bath meeting of the British Asso{sic} ciation, affirmed that an eminent chemist had ``not been able to find any fluidity in the Bath waters.'' Fluorine was meant. It was also stated that a geologist asserted that ``the bones found in the submerged forests of Devonshire were closely representative of the British farmer.'' The last word should have been fauna. <p 150>