It’s quite difficult to avoid typographical errors. Ask any writer and they will tell you. Look closely at this short article and you’re bound to find one or two. Many good examples of common errors are given in Lynne Truss’s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves and, in one particularly amusing anecdote, she highlights how the avoidance of typos can occasionally be a matter of life or death. Apparently Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) was arrested and charged under the Treason Act of 1351, having been intercepted while attempting to import arms from the Germans with insurrection in mind. As it turned out, the Act in question was written in unpunctuated Norman French, which sometimes led to difficulties interpreting the finer points of its meaning. Casement’s defence rested on the absence of a comma in a clause that began: “If a man be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere…”  

Casement’s lawyers contended that their client’s treasonous plotting with the Germans did not amount to being “adherent to the King’s enemies in the realm”. 

Alas the judges decided to clear up the matter by examining the original statute in the Public Records Office. Finding a feint comma in just the right spot, they ruled that it didn’t matter where exactly the King’s enemies were: treason was treason.  Sir Roger Casement was thus said to have been “hanged on a comma”.

Less lethal but more amusing is the nickname of The Guardian. The satirical magazine Private Eye once re-christened it ‘The Grauniad’, an anagram of the newspaper’s proper name that referred to its reputation for frequent typos during the old days of hot-metal typesetting. Founded as The Manchester Guardian in 1821 and abbreviated to The Guardian in 1959, the newspaper was printed in its home town each night and early editions were then rushed down to London by train in time for the morning readership, apparently offering little time for copyediting.

On at least one occasion, the newspaper even misspelled its own name as ‘The Gaurdian’. Its reputation for such errors is largely undeserved today, while its average daily circulation remains as healthy as its ability to laugh at itself. The Guardian even owns the domain name www.grauniad.co.uk, which automatically directs the net-surfer to the newspaper’s official website.   

But typos are not limited to statutes and newspapers; even classic works of literary fiction are prone. There is no finer case in point than James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Coincidentally perhaps, The Manchester Guardian reviewed it upon its publication on May 4, 1939, and complained about Joyce’s use of complex neologisms, remarking that, “the work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known.” 

Moreover, a “stream of consciousness” writing style did not protect Finnegan’s Wake from the occasional typo. In 2010, an edition by Joyce scholars Rose and O’Hanlon was published, incorporating around 9,000 minor amendments of spelling, punctuation, syntax and phraseology. Joyce would no doubt have approved; he is reputed to have said that he wrote the book to keep the critics busy for 300 years.

It is easy to sympathise with Joyce; how hard it is to avoid typos in one’s manuscript. Because they inevitably exist, there is a cardinal rule in writing, namely that an author should never re-read their own work if it has already been published. I brazenly ignored this injunction recently when I flicked through a book of mine, entitled Fiction and Physicians: Medicine through the Eyes of Writers. Part of the book is about fictional doctors, while the remainder deals with famous writers who also happened to be real doctors. In keeping with the latter theme, as some readers will know, James Joyce briefly attended Cecilia Street Medical School – an affectionate name (on the basis of its location) for what was then the Catholic University Medical School. Alas, during months of drafting, re-drafting and editing my manuscript, what began as “Cecilia St” somehow became inverted to read “St Cecilia”. Add some overzealous copyediting and the published version reads: “Most noteworthy is James Joyce, who studied at St Cecilia’s Medical School in Dublin and – for a short period – at the Sorbonne in Paris.”  

Thankfully, I have yet to receive any correspondence on the matter from Senator David Norris or, indeed, from anyone else omniscient in all matters to do with James Joyce. The Guardian would no doubt sympathise with my peccadillo. Joyce himself might have nodded sagely. And happily, unlike Sir Roger Casement and the Treason Act of 1351, nobody in this instance was hanged.