A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown - day 116

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There is a typo on the back cover of my book. Not the dust jacket – the cover itself, on the first ninety copies of A Speccy Man Has a Breakdown. Rhik Samadder kindly gave me a quote and his word “shining” became “shinging”:

The traditional publisher’s remedy is an erratum slip: a small printed correction, tucked inside. The traditional wording is for X read Y.

I decided to type ninety of them, one per affected copy, on my manual typewriter.

I type by touch on a computer, with eight fingers and my right thumb (space bar). But the manual typewriter made me nervous – I was sure I’d miss the keys – so I started by picking out the letters with two fingers.

I discovered that I could type 15 errata on a single sheet of A4 paper, even when some of them overran.

Two-finger typing was slow and painstaking, but not failsafe: I still missed the right keys occasionally, even after several sheets.

For the last two sheets I reverted to touch-typing. Faster, mostly better – but still not clean.

I want to make it clear that many errata slips were typed correctly. I wasn’t trying to get them wrong. But here is a taste of what ninety attempts produced. And remember: “Shinging” was supposed to be the only mistake on the page.

In this typing extravaganza I generated, among others: ERRATUK, ERRATTUM, ERRATUJM, ERROTUM.

Elsewhere I typed thus: “The publisher regrets the erroor.” “The oublisher.” “Reaf ‘shining’.”

Then there was a correction to the original mistake that misspelled the original mistake:

One slip where ‘shining’, ‘shijgingz’ and ‘shinging’ all appear, struck through, as if I were arguing with myself in real time.

One that simply records the collapse – “oh dear, this is going very badly” – before starting a new line.

And a final slip that trails off mid-sentence: “Publisher I mean. The.”

I’m keeping the spoiled ones. They go into the books with the clean ones, in the same sequence I typed them. So if your copy of the book arrives with a misspelled erratum slip, it’s not just a second mistake on top of the first. It’s the whole point.

The book is about being hopeless and carrying on anyway. The slips are the same argument, by other means.

The publisher regrets the error, and has decided to leave it in.

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👉 If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a crisis line in your country. In the UK, Samaritans are available any time on 116 123.

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