Good Books About Small Things
The ability to buy books online means that I am easily parted from my money.
It is a regular occurrence in the office that a package with a smiley face will arrive of an afternoon, and my purchases are so frequent and impulsive that I often cannot anticipate what is inside.
This past week I tweeted about the arrival of this little gem, "Just My Type: A Book About Fonts" by Simon Garfield.
It is about so much more than fonts, as I soon discovered when I spent the first half of the high school football game last Friday with my nose buried in its pages.
Yeah, I can only nominally be called a Texan given my lack of devotion to Friday Night Lights.
The book is an entertaining history of how we got from texts handwritten by scribes, to moveable type that endeavored to look like handwriting, to mechanical type that was designed for clear communication, to digital typefaces.
Included in the yarn was the tale of what might be the worst typo of all time: the "Wicked Bible." Because of a typesetter's error, congregants in the British reformation, who had only recently received scripture in their native tongue, were actually commanded to commit adultery:
We are not immune from such whoppers, just because we no longer set moveable type. A Google search for the worst typos ever yielded this post about other embarrassing moments in publishing history. Spell checker never would have caught most of them.
The recipe undoubtedly called for "ground black pepper," not "ground black people." Likewise, Garrison Keillor's opus does not include "Prairie Ho's"--unless he's gone gangsta without my noticing.
Stay tuned for an upcoming article on how to become a better editor of your own work. Thankfully, as much damage as a bad brief can do, we are unlikely to send a rocket crashing into the sea through misplacing a hyphen.
I'm just a humble appellate lawyer, and writing the King's English is not rocket science. Is it?
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