Literary Blunders

Delight in other people''s errors never dates and this little book first published in 1893 is a fount of human folly and a joy to read. Its compiler Henry Benjamin Wheatley (18381917) was a distinguished librarian bibliographer and scholar and a prolific author on London history and the history of books. This publication displays his great sense of humour and his effortless command of far-flung sources in the search for a good joke. Citing examples from historians to misguided schoolboys as well as from everyday conversation Wheatley looks at comic misprints misunderstandings and garbled English in foreign parts. However the book also has a more serious contribution to make: the chapter on printed errata makes use of the earliest evidence of proof correction by authors and the analysis of misprints in early printing shows how many variant readings in the works of Shakespeare came about.