Most people who write at all could contribute something worth
quoting to a symposium on printer's errors. A rather agreeable one is recalled by Canon Anthony Deane in the memories he has just published under the title Time Remembered. Writing for The Church Times, of all papers, he was describing some riverside scene in which "the young men and women would land for a picnic tea, disappearing among the bushes, and leaving their punts behind them." The printer saw fit to substitute an " a " for the " u" in punts ; fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—it was discovered in time. There is rather a fatality about these particular vowels. One of my own earliest literary efforts was a review in a college magazine of James Hilton's admirable parody of Swinburne, The Octopus, in the course of which I quoted the quatrain:
"0 breast that 'twere rapture to writhe on, 0 arms 'twere delicious to feel Clasped close with the clutch of the python When he maketh his murderous meal. . . ."
In this case the printer put a " u " for the " a " in " rapture "—and in this case it was not discovered in time.
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