Title: Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 5, Issue 49 (31 January 1891)

Editor: Robert Coupland Harding

In: Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 5

Publication details: Robert Coupland Harding, 1891, Napier

Part of: Typo

License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence

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A Sydney paper has constructed from the word « Tasmania » the disagreeable anagram, « I am Satan. » This will probably provoke reprisals on the part of the Van-Diemen's-landers.

Last month we briefly referred to the death in September last of Alice Havers (Mrs Fred Morgan), a popular artist. She had been suffering severely from neuralgia, and was in the habit of injecting morphia into her forehead to allay the pain. Her death was caused by an overdose of the dangerous anæsthetic. She began to exhibit in the Royal Academy in 1873. Much of her work was done for the higher class of « booklets » and other art publications, among these being a beautiful series of monochrome designs illustrating British ballads, published in 1879. Her husband, Mr Evans, was also an artist.

L'Intermédiare des Chercheurs et des Curieux gives some comical illustrations of bookbinders' blunders in lettering. The following are examples: the first being the best-known novel of the century, and the other the works of Brantôme:—

« Verdus: Opera, » was the blunder of a binder who took Verdi for a genitive. « Roussel, Systeme ph. et moral de la femme, » became Systeme fémoral de la femme.

These were the titles attached respectively to De l' Expropriation, by Daffry de la Monnaie, and Du Régime dotal, by Bellot des Minières. In a collection of typographic blunders in our Bucharest contemporary, Tipografia Română, we note two particularly rich. The intelligent comp having to set a reference to a surgical work, Tratat practic de Gastrotomie, substituted Gastronomie for the final word. Another equally brilliant genius, finding in his manuscript copy, Archipelagul de Cook, converted it into Archipelagul de 600 kilogr.! After this the comp of the Cromwell Argus who reminded « those liable to pay poverty tax » that if the amount is under £15 it must be paid in full on 26th November, may take a back seat. However, the Woodville artist who thus deliciously misquotes Goldsmith: « The rude Corinthian boar that drives the homeless traveller from his door, » will hold his own, even in an international competition. And, talking of misquotations, can anyone better this, from a Wairarapa paper? « Shelley's lines will apply:

He evidently fears his fate,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dare not put it to the test,
To win or loose his all. »

The stanza, we need scarcely say, was written two centuries before Shelley's time, and the quotation contains eight blunders, one of the rhymes, and all the poetry, being lost.—It its column of little jokes, the Yeoman has the following: « A book on etiquette tells 'how to tell a man larger than yourself that he is a coward.' The best way is to tell him Mr O'Conor has been declared elected unopposed for Buller. » A reference to « Charles King's legs » in an obituary notice of Cardinal Newman, shows how much one New York comp doesn't know about English authors.—The name, in the list of guests at a fashionable reception, of « Count Cantakehispantsoff, » in the same paper, does not come into the category of blunders, and indicates a proof-reader somewhat obtuse.