A recipe book calling for “freshly ground black people” has been pulped. Little wonder, writes Christopher Howse.
by: Christopher Howse
Seven thousand copies of The Pasta Bible have been pulped because a recipe in it called for a sprinkle of salt and "freshly ground black people". The recipe was for "spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto", or, as printed, for mis-spelt tagliatelle.
"Why anyone would be offended, we don't know," said the head of publishing at Penguin Australia. No, perhaps not, but pulped it had to be. It is, by the way, notable that the books were pulped, not burnt. There is a taboo against burning books, as if even pasta bibles were sacred.
Real Bibles are stuffed with errors. This is a consequence of the Cock-Up Coefficient (A "cock-up" is nothing rude, but a technical term for a misplaced piece of type.) The rule is that cock-ups occur in direct proportion to the importance of avoiding them. "Thou shalt commit adultery," declared the Book of Exodus in an edition of the Bible in 1631. The printers were fined £300. Those little words not and no are slippery customers.
"There was more sea," said the Book of Revelation in a printing of 1641, to general hilarity, since it should have said "There was no more sea." "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?" asked St Paul in a printing by the clever men at Cambridge in 1653. More inventively, Jesus was represented, by transposition of a single letter in a printing in 1716, as telling the woman caught in adultery: "Go and sin on more."
If these grave errors corrupted generations of Bible-readers, they lack the poignancy of the 17th-century misprinting of Psalm 119: "Printers have persecuted me without cause." The printer is easy to blame, but it was his very reliability that gave misprints their interest. John Simon, after his retirement as Lord Chancellor, complained to a newspaper for the "wounding error" of giving his age in an article as 78 instead of 77. Those were the days. Now that compositors are nearly extinct, the result somehow loses its entertainment value.
Classic misprints depend on an interplay between the writer's ambition and the bathetic outcome. Philip Hope-Wallace, the opera critic, liked to tell not only of a review he had written of The Merchant of Venice being printed with Olivier filling the role of "Skylark", but, best of all, the chain of misfortunes attending his review of Tosca. He had described the heroine as appearing "like a tigress robbed of her whelps".
First, a feminist-minded subeditor changed tigress to tiger; then, crucially, whelps was printed as whelks. So the reader was presented next day with the baffling image of Tosca "like a tiger robbed of his whelks". For someone who enjoyed recounting in El Vino's, the Fleet Street bar, his persecution by printers, it was suitable that when, on his 60th birthday, a little plaque was unveiled where Hope-Wallace habitually sat, it should spell his Christian name as "Phillip".
Such errors wait for their victim. But the "black people" misprint relied for its force on our anxiety not to be suspected of grinding down black people. Different anxieties a century ago meant that a four-letter word could shock far more electrically than now. On June 12, 1882, the Times published an advertisement for a book called Every-Day Life in our Public Schools (6s), "with a glossary on some words used by Sir Henry Irving in his disquisition upon f–ing, which is in common use in those schools".
That must have been deliberate sabotage, but the perpetrator was never caught. In our own age, it is fear of falling into the use of "inappropriate language" of a social rather than a sacrilegious or scatological kind that has dug a new network of elephant traps beneath our fingers on the keyboard.
From: Telegraph
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