tandard is nothing less than perfection, the ordinary human eye is
able to apply the standard. These tricks of the malicious imp are
commonly called "misprints," "printer's errors," "errors of the press,"
or, more impartially, "errata" or "corrigenda." In the first three names
there is a tinge of unfairness, because the printer is by no means
responsible for all the mistakes that appear in type. The author is
usually partly to blame and may be chiefly; yet when he suffers a lapse
of memory or knowledge, he usually passes it off as a "printer's error."
Sometimes the author's handwriting may mislead the printer, but when so
good a biblical scholar as Mr. Gladstone wrote of _Daniel_ in the fiery
furnace, there was no possibility that the single name could have stood
in his manuscript for the names of the three men whose trial is
mentioned in the _book_ of Daniel. Even here the submission of proof
fixes the final responsibility on the author. But, quite apart from the
responsibility for them, the mistakes embalmed in type are among the
most interesting of all literary curiosities.

Misprints--to use the handiest term--range in importance from the
innocent and obvious, like a turned _a_, and the innocent and obvious
only to the expert, like a turned _s_, to a turned _n_, which may be
mistaken for a _u_, or the change or omission of a punctuation mark,
which may involve claims to thousands of dollars. Even the separation of
one word into two may reverse the meaning of the sentence, yet not
betray itself by any oddity of phrase, as when the atheist who had
asserted that "God is nowhere" found himself in print standing sponsor
for the statement that "God is now here." The same trick of the types
was played on an American political writer in his own paper regarding
his pet reform, which he meant to assert was "nowhere in existence." The
earliest printed books were intended to be undistinguishable from
manuscripts, but occasionally a turned letter betrayed them absolutely.
In the same way the modern newspaper now and then introduces an
unintentional advertisement of the linotype by presenting to its readers
a line upside down. Another trick is the mixing of two paragraphs, which
sometimes occurs even in books. The most famous instance of this blunder
is probably that which happened in the English "Men of the Time" for
1856, and which led to a serious lawsuit against the publishers. The
printer had mixed the biographies of the Bish