Far be it from the book-lover and the book-collector to rail at blunders, for not unfrequently these very blunders make books valuable.  Who cares for a Pine’s Horace that does not contain the ``potest’’ error?  The genuine first edition of Hawthorne’s ``Scarlet Letter’’ is to be determined by the presence of a certain typographical slip in the introduction.  The first edition of the English Scriptures printed in Ireland (1716) is much desired by collectors, and simply because of an error.  Isaiah bids us ``sin no more,’’ but the Belfast printer, by some means or another, transposed the letters in such wise as to make the injunction read ``sin on more.’’

The so-called Wicked Bible is a book that is seldom met with, and, therefore, in great demand.  It was printed in the time of Charles I., and it is notorious because it omits the adverb ``not’’ in its version of the seventh commandment; the printers were fined a large sum for this gross error.  Six copies of the Wicked Bible are known to be in existence.  At one time the late James Lenox had two copies; in his interesting memoirs Henry Stevens tells how he picked up one copy in Paris for fifty guineas.

Rabelais’ printer got the satirical doctor into deep water for printing asne for ame; the council of the Sorbonne took the matter up and asked Francis I. to prosecute Rabelais for heresy; this the king declined to do, and Rabelais proceeded forthwith to torment the council for having founded a charge of heresy upon a printer’s blunder.

Once upon a time the Foulis printing establishment at Glasgow determined to print a perfect Horace; accordingly the proof sheets were hung up at the gates of the university, and a sum of money was paid for every error detected.

Notwithstanding these precautions the edition had six uncorrected errors in it when it was finally published.  Disraeli says that the so-called Pearl Bible had six thousand errata!  The works of Picus of Mirandula, Strasburg, 1507, gave a list of errata covering fifteen folio pages, and a worse case is that of ``Missae ac Missalis Anatomia’’ (1561), a volume of one hundred and seventy-two pages, fifteen of which are devoted to the errata.  The author of the Missae felt so deeply aggrieved by this array of blunders that he made a public explanation to the effect that the devil himself stole the manuscript, tampered with it, and then actually compelled the printer to misread it.

I am not sure that this ingenious explanation did not give origin to the term of ``printer’s devil.’’

   It is frightful to think
      What nonsense sometimes
   They make of one’s sense
      And, what’s worse, of one’s rhymes.

   It was only last week,
      In my ode upon spring,
   Which I meant to have made
      A most beautiful thing,

   When I talked of the dewdrops
      From freshly blown roses,
   The nasty things made it
      From freshly blown noses.