5 Insane Printer's Errors That Changed Entire Books

In case you can't read a five-century old typesetting, number 14 says, "Thou fhalt commit adultery." "Not" is the least-fun word of any commandment, so of course we'd like to think Barker left it out because the dude knew how to party. We can't. We wish we could tell you that this printer's error led to a sudden rise in birthrates as key parties broke out all over London. But in reality, this typesetting mistake would have been considered little more than amusement. But one person who did not find the Wicked Bible amusing was King Charles I. Barker was summoned to a legal hearing and reportedly fined for not proofreading his literally damnable text closely enough. After the hearing, Charles ordered the errant Bibles rounded up and destroyed.

Wicked Bibles are fairly scarce today, and collectors pay tens of thousands of dollars at auction for them. As it turns out, a teensy printer's error not only allowed for Church-sanctioned extramarital affairs, but also boosted the value of Barker's delightfully sinful bible by several magnitudes.

Instead of appearing on Leda's doorstep and showering her with compliments and Applebee's gift cards like a real man, Zeus waited until Leda took her daily nude stroll through the forest and then transformed himself into a swan. He pretended to be running from an eagle, then made a lusty bee-line straight for her crotch. It makes sense when you think about it. What else could Leda do? If someone's being chased, a lady should try to hide at least some of that person in her vagina.

The line between rescuing a woodland creature and fucking a woodland creature was apparently blurry for Leda. She gave birth to twins as a result of this aviary indiscretion, and one of those freaky swan spawn was Helen of Troy.

Understanding the story of Leda and the Swan is important for more than just cataloging scenes of bestiality painted by Michelangelo ...

The 1568 Bishop's Bible is known informally as the "Leda Bible" because of the decorative initial that opens Saint Paul's epistle to the Hebrews. Rather than an appropriately Christian ornament like a cross, or a dove, or a priest punching the side of a Planned Parenthood clinic, the printer elected to affix this:

That's Leda taking up one-twelfth of the page to fornicate with a water fowl. On a Pauline letter, no less! Saint Paul may have been the most anti-fucking apostle in the whole New Testament, which he very clearly proved in I Corinthians, Chapter 7: "It is good for a man not to touche a woman." To be fair, Paul didn't say anything about "toucheing" geese.

Leda's impropriety immediately changed the spirit of the book. Opening with a Greek heroine engaged in bestial hedonism really undercuts the more sanctimonious tone of the sermon. Especially when you consider where it was occurring: in the letter G, being the first letter of the word GOD. It's not a rule that's been written anywhere or passed by legislators, but people shouldn't be fucking birds while inside God.

The image on the left shows what the pressman was initially working with. The man in the picture, standing there proving that if you don't want a dick drawn on you, don't stand like you want a dick drawn on you, is Uncle Silas. Originally, this illustration was supposed to depict Huck disguising himself as Silas' nephew. Uncle Silas juts backwards in dramatic confusion while Aunt Sally hovers nearby as if she suspects what's really going on. With a few scratches into a printing plate, however, the scene (center) lands Huck squarely in To Catch A Predator territory. Now fully phallused and erect, Uncle Silas is suddenly committing an act of child sexual assault, Sally appears to have arranged the twisted encounter, and Huck is standing there clearly thinking "The fuck?"

What Uncle Silas is sporting there barely counts as a Vienna sausage. You see, in order to pass casual inspection, the penile vandal had to make Silas's peen no bigger than a mealworm. Hang the preacher like a horse and you're going to get caught lickety-split.

The desire to slip this obscenity past the censors must also account for why Silas's manhood starts a third of the way down his thigh. Anatomically speaking, Uncle Silas was a mess.

To this day, rare book dealers always note the position of Uncle Silas's fly in their descriptions of the first-edition copies of Huckleberry Finn with words like curved, defacement, or straight descriptions that all sound appropriately phallic.

This explanation is plausible, but a few nagging questions remain. Why do the polar bears have "thin and hairless scalps"? And why are they "arming" themselves? Bears have claws. Huge intestine-extracting claws. At seven feet tall and 900 pounds, polar bears are living, breathing weapons of mass destruction. How did they organize? Can they hold town hall meetings? Etc.

Some printing context may shed a little light on these questions. Compositors used cases like the one pictured below to hold individual letters, numbers, and punctuation while setting type:

Not unlike using a keyboard today, compositors set their type without staring directly at their hands. If the E's and D's were sitting close enough (also like today), one letter could be "picked" by mistake. The whole Shakespearean white bears conundrum was probably nothing more than a typo. After all, if you change "beares" to "beards," you get: "White beards have armed their thin and hairless scalps against thy majestie," and that makes a whole lot more sense. Small printing errors can have far-reaching effects. In Shakespeare's case, they changed a septuagenarian revolt against Richard II into an awesome but thoroughly nonsensical ursine one.

"I can look at a knot of wood until I am frightened at it."

"I was Socrates."

"I have an obscure recollection of having been with Jesus Christ."

"For many years I longed to see Satan."

These are all things that demonstrated dear Mr. Blake's pathological preoccupation. Did he talk to the dead? Yes! Was he constantly haunted by terrifying monsters and demons? Yep! Was one of his poems dictated to him by a fairy living inside his parlor? You better believe it! William Blake's mind is what happens when Poltergeist, Rosemary's Baby, and Pan's Labyrinth have a no-holds-barred three-way in the Overlook Hotel.

Consider this contemporary review of Blake's illustration for the 1796 edition of Leonora: "Blake draws men and women without skins, with their joints all dislocated ... imaginary beings which neither can nor ought to exist."

Okay, a little context, here. Leonora was a popular German poem about a young woman (Leonora) whose fiance (William) runs off to the Seven Years' War. Leonora is distraught when he goes missing, and blames God. Because God is kind and loving and all-powerful, he returns William unscathed. Ha, just kidding. Death disguises himself as William, shows up at Leonora's door, and then drags the 16-year-old to hell for blasphemy. That's how Christianity works.

Leonora is a terrifically macabre story, so of course it was immensely popular in 18th-century Europe. Here is an illustration by Johann David Schubert, circa 1800:

You can almost see the Disney movie in the making. Look at those doe-ish eyes, that perfect hair, the supple bosom, the tiny waist. It's physically impossible to ride a horse the way she's sitting, but eat a dick, physics! Leonora is in love! And is that a nude ankle we see? If it weren't for the cones of demonic light shooting out of the horse's nostrils, this would be every German girl's fantasy.

And now here's some art from the side of Blake that wanted to meet the devil:

Now that's how you ride a horse when Death is galloping you straight to Hell. You hold on for your freaking life and pray the naked mosh pit below doesn't get its depraved claws on you. Blake's Leonora is appropriately scared shitless and has no goddamn time for bouncy tits or ankle flashing.

Blake's illustration changed the focus of Leonora from "jaunty ride through the countryside" to "holy shit, demon voyeurs are tearing open the fucking sky!" And this was not a change that readers in 1796 appreciated. Was it a printer's error to have Blake illustrate a German children's poem? Personally, we say, "Of course not! And you're an uncultured ignoramus for questioning it." But considering that Blake was blacklisted after Leonora and never illustrated another book that wasn't commissioned by himself or a close friend, well, we'll say the real error was getting a mentally ill, Satan-obsessed artist to illustrate a children's story.

J.P. Romney has another book called "The Monster On The Road Is Me."

For more, check out The 7 Most Disastrous Typos Of All Time and 5 Tiny Computer Glitches That Caused Huge Disasters.

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