Literary Blunders; A Chapter in the "History of Human Error"

Literary blunders – is a work which was published in 1893 and written by Henry Benjamin Wheatley. He was a British editor, author and the so-called father of indexing. In this volume, Henry Benjamin Wheatley discusses various typographical errors, poor translation from other languages to English and vice versa, Irish bulls, deliberate and accidental misquotations, and factual errors in student papers and exams. A satirist friend of the author who has seen the proofreading of this small volume says that it should be entitled "Jokes Old and New." But the author found that he rarely admits that a joke is new, and so the author hoped that his readers would change adjectives and accept old jokes for new ones. The author also believed that if some parts of the book were considered frivolous, then some useful literary information could be found in the chapters with lists of typos and errors. This volume contains such chapters as: “Blunders in General”, “Blunders of Authors”, “Blunders of Translators”, “Bibliographical Blunders”, “Lists of Errata”, “Misprints”, “Schoolboys' Blunders” and “Foreigners' English”.