Booking Through Thursday: Typography

You may or may not have seen my post at Punctuality Rules Tuesday, about a book I recently bought that had the actual TITLE misspelled on the spine of the book. A glaring typographical error that really (really!) should have been caught. So, using that as a springboard, today’s question: What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?

I can’t, off the top of my head late at night, think of anything too horrible (certainly not a misspelt title!). I think most of the errors I’ve seen have been the mixing-up of homophones: ‘yolk’ and ‘yoke’, ‘allude’ and ‘elude’, ‘peak’ and ‘pique’, etc. They always annoy me, though, especially when there’s a lot of them in one book, because I always see them and wonder how anything so obvious got overlooked. Outside books, but still in the realm of published writing, a column in the Courier-Mail recently referred to a group of comedians ‘poking fun of’ the Opposition leader.

And then there’s the one I once saw in a Human Cell Biology lecture. A slide came up featuring a schematic of the digestive tract and something about the regulation of apatite. I spent several very confused moments trying to fathom why some poor person would have a white crystalline mineral in their stomach before I realised he meant the regulation of appetite. (Well, it was an 8 a.m. class!)