So… recently, despite three levels of editing and proofreading the formatted books, one of Affinity’s published books had a big oopsie. A repeated chapter overwrote the actual chapter. None of us can even figure out how it happened. As I researched this, I came across a couple of possibilities in the Word program, which all Affinity authors use. Fortunately, the error was caught quickly, and the corrected documents have been uploaded everywhere, but this was not without consequence. Note: Anyone who bought Gold Bands and Silver Buckles during the first couple of days can now get the corrected version from Amazon and other distributors. This experience got me thinking: what other famous books have had consequential errors? I wanted to find out because, of course, it would make us feel better to know that even the greats have made mistakes! It seems that no book can escape this possibility…not even the Bible. So here’s what I learned…

A 1631 edition of the King James Bible made the grave error of slightly changing the seventh Commandment to: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” I bet that made the adulterers very happy. This bible was called “The Wicked Bible.”
While Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain deliberately contained misspellings and incorrect grammar consistent with the main character who was uneducated and “unsivilized” as Mark Twain noted, page 57 had a typo not explained by this purposeful prose. The 1885 version reads, “I took the bag…and ripped a hole in the bottom of it with the was.” Okay, what the hell was Twain trying to say? It was a simple error where Twain had accidentally swapped the consonants. The correction to “with the saw” was fixed in later versions.
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, the first edition contained this passage: “a moment of panic before he saw him walking along the bench downshore.” I think we can all assume he meant beach.
In Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, another classic book, an errant “come in” snuck into a book, and Joyce kept it there because, as he was dictating, a friend came to his door and he said, “Come in.” Joyce had an unusual style, and he was so amused by this that he decided he’d just keep it in the book.
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin, the author of the popular Fire and Ice series that inspired the popular series Game of Thrones, was riddled with typos. One of the more obvious ones was in book 5: “‘I am beautiful,’ she reminded himself.”
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer has been a book that many note a number of spelling and grammar errors, but the one that seems to really upset some is the historical inaccuracy around a sewer system in London that was supposedly in existence nearly two hundred years before London actually had one.
In Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, no one knows if the character’s name is Alice or Agnes because both names are used, and that was not by design.
And…last but not least, because this one is so ironic…The 1934 Webster’s New International Dictionary had a glaring error for five years! An editor, writing down the abbreviation for “density,” wrote “D or d” to show that the letter could be both uppercase and lowercase. But the spaces somehow did not make it into the book, so instead of the abbreviations, another editor removed the spaces and listed the word “dord” as a synonym for density.

Of course, I cannot guarantee there won’t be future errors, because, as my title says, To Err is Human, but I know that authors and publishers do everything in their power to keep our books as error-free as possible. I do a complete reread at least five times at every stage of the process. That means a minimum of fifteen full re-reads. I am so sick of my book by the time I send it off for final formatting that the last thing I want to do is re-read it one more time. But if MS Word is going to do something funky in the formatting stage, well then, I guess one more time won’t kill me! I know the author was very happy to hear about the error, as I would be, so we thank those readers who are both gracious and gentle when they let us know something is amiss. I thank you in advance for letting us know about these errors and for continuing to buy our books. Speaking of which, I’d love for you to check out my books…just click the links below.