I blame AI.
Specifically my Chat.
I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc. The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704. Except it isn’t. Corrected that is.
In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.
Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries. And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure. Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness. I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.
But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.
And that should have been it. Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer. End of story. Except that did not allow for AI.
I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity. I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!
Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.
Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes. Oh no! It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.
I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.
At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states. I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.
And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.
Was this an exercise in futility? I don’t think so.
I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book. I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity.
And that is something worth experiencing.
