The E-Sylum:  Volume 5, Number 21, May 19, 2002, Article 15

OOPS!  THE BIG TYPO THAT GOT AWAY

  Last week I asked for stories about misplaced numismatic
  manuscripts. Here's a story from Fred Schwan of BNR
  Press, about the 1993 Fifth Edition of Grover Criswell's
  "Confederate and Southern States Currency", taken from
  the foreword of Criswell's "Comprehensive Catalog of
  Confederate Paper Money", 1996, describing their final
  push to complete the book in time for release at the 1992
  American Numismatic Association convention in Orlando,
  FL:

  "As the final day approached the intensitry increased. We
  pulled out all of the stops.  I worked the last 36 hours
  straight, but we had the pages ready at precisely the time
  necessary to go to the manufacturer.  I assembled the
  pages and drove to the printing plant.

  It was the very last and simplest thing that I bungled.  In
  assembling the final copies I took the wrong copies of the
  formatter.

  There were two piles on my desk.  One pile was a clean
  copy of the pages that had been corrected.  The other pile
  was of bad pages from which the corrections had been
  posted.  In my desperation and fatigue, I simply picked up
  the bad pages and left the good ones on my desk!  To
  make it worse, when I got home of course I went to bed,
  then cleaned my office by throwing out the piles of
  accumulated paper including the correct copies of the
  formatter.

  The most tragic of the errors was the misspelling of
  Confederate on the spine of the book.   Ironically, this
  dreadful mistake was not noticed  by many readers who
  saw what they expected to find on the cover.

  The mistakes caused Grover and me substantial
  embarrassment, as certainly they should have.  However,
  I must say that Grover was quite the gentleman about the
  whole thing and so were most readers."

  [The spine read "Confererate".  Can anyone provide
  examples of other such typos on numismatic books?
  - Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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