Saturday, May 07, 2011

Classic book mistakes

A vast list of corrections and clarifications just published for Modernist Cuisine reminds me of how much fun such howlers are.
Alison Flood on her Guardian blog, 4 May, 2011
Flame and shame ... Sorry, did we say centigrade? We meant fahrenheit. Photograph: Mike Abrahams / Alamy/Alamy

It might have achieved "astounding new flavours and textures", run to 2,400 pages and six volumes and claimed to reinvent cooking, but I dread to think what readers of Modernist Cuisine who haven't checked the book's extensive list of corrections and clarifications are creating in their kitchens.

Take a look: it's ridiculously long, exhaustively thorough and has me, at least, giggling like a schoolchild. I think my favourite is "in the top left paragraph, 'tories' should read 'laboratories'" – but I'm also fond of "'Normal Rockwell' should read 'Norman Rockwell'", "'your own spirts' should read 'your own spirits'" and "'Dripping' should read 'Dipping'." "Causal", the corrections tell us firmly, elsewhere, "should read 'casual' and 'desert' should read 'dessert'."

Who knows, meanwhile, what would have been cooked up if readers had followed the original instructions here? "In the recipe for Compressed Tomato, an additional step should be taken before step one: 'Remove the cores'."

Or here? "In the recipe for Goulash broth, steps three and seven should be omitted."

Or here? "In the note in the margin, '192.2 °C' should read '192.2 °F'."

"Why do you need a copyeditor? Because you don't want to have to make these kinds of corrections in your second edition," writes editor Erin Brenner, who tweeted about the corrections extravaganza yesterday.

They're certainly bad, but not as embarrassing as – in another cookbook cock-up, strangely enough - Penguin Australia's misprint, which suggested that a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto should include "salt and freshly ground black people", rather than pepper. Or how about HarperCollins mistakenly printing an early version of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, littered with errors? Or Penguin accidentally chopping off the fictional foreword from Lolita?

It's mean to laugh – but it's hard to resist. Any publishing howlers you're particularly fond of which might give us all a chuckle?

2 comments:

Madeleine Marie Slavick said...

I've seen:

--'hell' typed instead of 'hello'

--'pubic' not 'public'

--and in the Wairarapa, 'hey for sale', not 'hay'

Beattie's Book Blog said...

And in Thailand recently I saw:

Surin Beach Sweet Hotel

and

Home made Norwegian salmon