Show notes
Michael Rosen finds out about fascinating literary errors from editor Rebecca Lee, the author of Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books. They share favourite famous typos and find out where the phrase "out of sorts" originated. Produced for BBC Audio Bristol by Beth O'Dea, in partnership with the Open University.
Highlighted moments
the compositors found a way around this, which was just to shove another E in between those two letters, just to give them a bit of breathing space.
“The most famous error in the Bible is what's known as the Wicked Bible, where the compositors managed to omit the word not from one of the Ten Commandments, thereby encouraging the readers to go and commit adultery.”
“So a sort is a piece of individual type. And printers were running their businesses on a shoestring. They're pretty mean. They would only buy the amount of type that they needed, the minimum they could get away with. So the poor compositors would be trying to typeset something and perhaps run out of a sort. So run out of the letter A or run out of the letter E. And they would be literally, and then probably emotionally as well, out of sorts.”
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