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.

Wait. White bears? Was the English monarch so thoroughly despised that even the wild animals were taking up arms against him? So according to Shakespeare, polar bears from the Arctic felt personally threatened by King Richard because he planned to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, or roll back EPA regulations, or some other equally pinheaded act of environmental self-destruction? So they marched their frozen furry asses down to London to beat the living shit out of him?

JohnPitcher/iStock

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.

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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