The news came by way of an Amazon customer review. An interested reader – four stars, you're very kind! – pointed out a “huge mistake” in my recent biography of Glenn Gould. I had written that Gould soaked his hands in “ice cold water” before performances and recordings.
Of course he didn't. He soaked his hands in scalding hot water. Nor was this a matter of disputed record or rival schools of thought about what is better for a player's hands. Some online noodling quickly showed that I was alone in my cold-water view, and further that at least one Gould discussion board was already mocking me for it. (For the record, they also said nice things. You're very kind!)
Now, whether you regard this mistake as huge is probably a matter of whose side you take in the following dispute. A Kingsley Amis character, a man of affairs, is arguing with his friend, a professor of Russian literature, who has complained of being busy. “The difference,” the first says, “is that if for any reason you leave any of your things undone, the result is merely an irreparable cultural loss, whereas if I do anything like that, it can have consequences that really matter.”
Whatever one's views on that, I think we can all agree with my Amazon friend that my huge error “should have been caught at least by the editor.”
I think Gould would have appreciated my cold-water error
The trouble is, despite what readers imagine, editors of books aren't generally in the business of catching mistakes, at least of the factual kind. Books are not routinely fact-checked, the way magazine articles are. Nor can even the best research assistants – and I had a superb one for this book – catch everything. So those pro forma acknowledgments where the author “takes sole responsibility for all remaining errors” is not eyewash, just the truth.
In short, I should have caught this mistake. The question is, why didn't I?
Errors in books are as old as books – in fact, even older if we include the manuscript books that predate incunabula and the spread of printed words. Transcribing each copy of a book was a surefire recipe for mistakes, as sleepy or bored monks let their eyes and minds wander. Some mistakes were so common they acquired euphonious Greek names. Homeoteleuton is the act of skipping from one line down to another because it has a similar ending, obliterating the words in between. Homeoarkton is doing the same thing to lines with similar beginnings.
It is maybe worth noting that these two errors also mean, at least since Aristotle's Rhetoric, the poetic device of deliberate repetition for effect.
It is maybe worth noting that when I first typed the sentence above, I wrote “nothing” in place of “noting.” Moveable type eliminated transcription errors in books, but it expanded by orders of magnitude the possibility of error generally. Now, dropped words (the tiny negating “not”) or even letters (the “l” in “public”) could drastically, and embarrassingly, alter meaning.
Worse, once a book was printed, the error was there to stay. In the old days, publishers would include little typed sheets of the errata spotted between final proof and printing; these missives would flutter from the front flap of first-edition hardcovers like wounded sparrows, feeble and ignored. Even a corrected later edition would not expunge the original gaffe, still out there in the world, mocking our pathetic intentions to get it right.
