Judging a Book by Its Typos

Should you judge a book by the typographical errors?

It depends.

No proofreader is perfect, and to find one or two minor typos in a book doesn’t say anything about the author. On the other hand, a self-published book riddled with mistakes leads me to believe that the author is a bad writer, and I don’t bother with those books. The same is true about a major factual error.

But I’ve just learned that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge, especially when the book is a reprint and the original author didn’t have the opportunity to review it.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed the Little Maid books by Alice Turner Curtis, who was one of the original writers of historical fiction for children. The Little Maid books are set against the background of the Revolutionary War, and the historical facts appeared to be accurate, although I don’t think I had actually checked any of them.

But I recently downloaded the Kindle version of A Little Maid of Old New York.  I was immediately put off by the opening chapter, which said the story took place in 1788 while the British still occupied New York. It also said that the British had controlled the city for seven years, which would have made the capture occur in 1781. The problem is that the British captured the city in 1776 and the war was officially over by September 1783 when the U.S. and Britain signed a peace treaty. My love of the series was crushed by a single wrong date.

Nonetheless, I decided to do some further investigation and discovered that the British abandoned New York in November 1783. Given the length of time it took to get news across the ocean in those days, that date made sense. It also worked for a seven years occupation beginning in 1776.

So I’m guessing that Curtis had accurately set the story in 1783 and that the wrong year was a typo in the Kindle version, which was published long after her 1958 death.

Which just goes to prove, you can’t always judge a book by its typos.

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The picture at the head of this post is an 1879 lithograph called “‘Evacuation Day’ and Washington’s Triumphal Entry in New York City, Nov. 25^th 1983.” It is attributed to Edmund and Ludwig Restein and is in the public domain because of its age.