Casual

...My own manuscripts, I note, contain more typos than previously...

...If so, I hope it's still true...

...Encyclopaedia Britannica some years ago printed a mis-cap-tioned photograph of Turgenev in its article on Tolstoy...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...I hope he or she one day comes to realize that Mr...

...People exist whose idea of a swell time is informing writers about typographical and other errors in their work...

...But this is our world now...

...I don't recall any typos in the New Yorker until fairly recently...

...When corrected, the copy editor, clever devil, put the correction right into the text, bracket, exclamation mark, and all...

...May their tombstones be free of typos...

...Perhaps he thought his discoveries of error would be set aright in later editions of my books, being unaware that, in my oeuvre, the rare books are the second editions...

...The worst howlers are those that one can't really blame on anyone else...

...Such is the prevalence of typos, that sometimes a writer's personal behavior will cause one to suspect typos after the fact...

...Howlers divide into those one causes on one's own and those caused by copy editors, proofreaders, and mysterious forces perhaps best not investigated too closely...

...Recounting the story to me, Edward said, "Hmm, Joseph, do you suppose in the epigraph to Howards End, where Forster wrote 'Only connect,' he really meant 'Only collect...

...The great proofreaders of yesteryear, selfless men and women of astonishingly active conscience, have for the most part by now gone to their just reward...

...In publishing a book, every writer becomes, potentially, his own H.W...

...Howler...

...Several years ago, Tom Wolfe told me that he'd heard there had never been a typo in the National Geographic...

...I've heard of books in which the author's name is misspelled on the title page...

...Looking up from the page, I thought, Ah, yes, those bloomers, God, they can be annoying, and felt a surge of fellow suffering with Professor Shattuck, whose proofreaders, if he had any, left him sadly exposed...

...Pages 241 through 256 in Ancestral Houses, Sonya Rudikoff's book about Virginia Woolf's snobbery, are pasted into the book upside down and backwards...

...Forster was interested in publishing a diary he had kept from his days in Egypt during World War I, tried to persuade Forster to publish it in the magazine Encounter...

...I once misquoted the lyrics from "The Lady is A Tramp," so that, in my version, the lady "hates California, it's cold and it's dark," instead of "it's damp...

...I once gave one of my books to an academic, who called to thank me, adding, in his Mittel-European accent, with a really rolling R, that the book was "bristling with typos...

...I had finally to tell him that I didn't welcome his calls...

...In the 1950s, my friend Edward Shils, having learned that E.M...

...Typographical errors, once so rare, are now scarcely noteworthy...

...By bloomers, of course, he intended bloopers, a word that includes the weird and wonderful world of typographical screw-ups, of which Roger Shattuck could not know that he would suffer a beaut...

...On page 241 of How We Got Here, David Frum's excellent study of the influence of the decade of the 1970s, one finds an odd bracket in a sentence that, in part, reads: ". . . well, it would have seemed like a throwback to the worst days of imperialism, [the hat, not the hairpiece!] when topee-wearing sahibs sipped gin on the verandah while talking condescendingly of the 'Asiastics.'" The origin of that bracket is a less than tip-top copy editor who wondered if by "topee" he didn't mean "toupe...

...May these gentlemen, as the Jews used to say of the tsar, live and be well, but not too close to me...

...This brought me many new pen pals, none of whom seemed impressed with my suggestion that, with my change in mind, the song could now be retitled as "The Lady is a Narc...

...I like to think this is owing to my composing on the computer, which has every virtue except that it doesn't let one see what one has written with the same clarity as that which one has typed on a sheet of white paper...

...A professor of engineering at Purdue took to calling me, usually in the evening, to report, in a morose voice, that he had found one or another kind of error in one of my books...

...Forster said he would certainly consider doing so, but then turned round and published it in Harper's, where he received a much larger fee...

...Scott Montcrieff's translation of Remembrance of Things Past, that "many critics, myself included, pointed out annoying bloomers and occasional excesses of style...

...I thanked him, and made a mental note never to give him another...

...Heaven knows, as the man said, anything goes...

...As for the various spell-check programs, they are, as everyone knows, the greatest of all faux amis...

...Frum's exclamation mark stands for idiot...