Min Chen writes for Artnet about an exhibition at Yale Library (is that what they’re calling Sterling Memorial now?) I’d love to see:
James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses arrived in 1922—in a printing riddled with errors. There was an errant period on page 30, a missing comma on page 529, an extra dash on page 578, and typos on pages 39, 95, 519, 650, and many more in between. So numerous were these mistakes that they filled a seven-page errata slip included with later printings. Joyce, whose novel was rich with allusions and stylistic parodies that describe a slippery reality, brushed aside these flaws: “These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
The idea that the printed mistake could be beautiful—and illuminating—is behind the Yale Library’s new exhibition, which unpacks 500 years of errata, or sheets listing errors in books that were already printed. Titled “‘Beauties of My Style,’” it brings together about 30 artifacts from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, including inaccurate maps, book corrections, and religious texts with very grave typographic blunders.
The exhibition is curated by design professors Rachel Churner and Geoff Kaplan; as the publishers behind No Place Press, they fully understand how human error can make its way into print. Their research into errata at the Beinecke further revealed how these corrections slips could carry “unexpected poetry,” Churner told me over email.
There are glorious images, including of course the Wicked Bible (“Thou shalt commit adultery”) as well as an errata slip for the 2004 translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle admitting that “new authorized translation” should actually read “unauthorized.” The exhibit will be on view March 30–September 6, 2026; if you’re in the vicinity and happen to drop in, do report back.
Somebody here recently mentioned Auden’s
in Letters from Iceland, where Auden wrote “poets”, but decided the error in the proofs he was reviewing was actually an improvement, and let it stand.
That one is unquestionably an improvement.
It’s at Sterling*: journalist must not have thought that detail in a press release was worth explaining. But not open until March 30 (as you note) so don’t grab the very next train to N.H. https://events.yale.edu/event/beauties-of-my-style-errata-and-the-printed-mistake
*I’m not sure exactly where within Sterling the “Hanke Gallery” is but one can probably figure that out with some diligent online sleuthing or just ask the security people at the front door.
Actually, to be fair to the journalist, if you scroll down from the quoted bit in the OP all the way to the very end of the article it does specify “is on view March 30–September 6, 2026 at the Sterling Memorial Library’s Hanke Gallery” and even gives a street address so you don’t go to the Beinecke by mistake.
And arguably, Yale itself puts everything under “Yale Library” ( https://library.yale.edu/ ), with a list of specific “Libraries / Locations”:
Bass Library
Beinecke Library
Classics Library
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Divinity Library
East Asia Library
Gilmore Music Library
Haas Family Arts Library
Lewis Walpole Library
Lillian Goldman Law Library
Marx Library
Sterling Memorial Library
Yale Center for British Art
In addition to renamings, there used to be various other libraries not on the list Craig gives. The two at which I personally worked for modest wages once upon a time both got demolished during other campus construction earlier in the current century, and I frankly have not tried to trace where their physical collections ended up. Nor do I know the current whereabouts of the books/journals that were anciently in the one-room “Ling Sem” library, which by the 1980s was not regularly staffed and was kept locked but you were given your own key if you were an undergraduate linguistics major. (I assume grad students got keys as well ..).
The Classics Library is anecdotally famous in our household because my now-wife once agreed to go on a date with a grad student who chatted her up there, on the theory that “being picked up in the Classics Library” was a sufficiently objectively ridiculous plot twist as to fit with the “everything is either a good time or a good story” attitude with which she approached life back then. (My own memory of the Classics Library is the more sober one of being shown by a professor circa four decades ago a newly-arrived CD-ROM – although maybe it wasn’t called that yet – that had on it in digitized form essentially the entire known corpus of ancient Greek texts, which seemed quite a radical technological breakthrough in those long-ago days.)
Nor do I know the current whereabouts of the books/journals that were anciently in the one-room “Ling Sem” library, which by the 1980s was not regularly staffed and was kept locked but you were given your own key if you were an undergraduate linguistics major. (I assume grad students got keys as well ..).
We had untrammeled entry, yes. Ah, that takes me back — I still have some offprints that were discarded from that room, and I met a girlfriend there…
and I met a girlfriend there
The plot thickens! Was it JWB’s now-wife?
i had that key when i worked in the department office in the late 90s! (not that i ever gave back a campus key once i had it – i ended up with ways into a lot of places) by then, the closest thing to Ling Sem staffing was the department administrator, in an office across the hall.
Of Yale Libraries should one count as separate the Library Shelving Facility in Hamden?
That “for authorized read UNauthorized” Debord translation looks like it would have been that by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Knabb, who allegedly never copyrights his own stuff because he’s an anarchist. That said, unless the late M. Debord took the same tack, the French original would still have been protected by copyright, rendering an unauthorized new English translation vulnerable to a lawsuit from either the Debord estate or perhaps the publisher of the prior authorized English translation. Maybe they decided such a lawsuit would be more hassle than its likely payoff, of course.
Min Chen: Joyce, whose novel was rich with allusions and stylistic parodies that describe a slippery reality, brushed aside these flaws: “These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
Oh no he didn’t! Chen links to an OUP blog post by Sam Slote, an eminent Joyce scholar, and that is *not* what Slote, or Joyce, said. First Slote quotes another of Joyce’s letters, from very late in the production of Ulysses: “I am extremely irritated by all those printer’s errors. … Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not.” Joyce made a lot of these complaints — he was very naive about how much accuracy is possible in a big novel on a short deadline, especially when the author insists on scrawling voluminous additions on the proof sheets! At the last minute he insisted on a note at the beginning of the book: “The publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances.”
Slote’s post is clear that by “beauties of my style” Joyce was not referring to misprints in general, but to *some* of a list of corrections suggested by the publisher of the second edition: Joyce was stetting them. (The preceding sentence in the letter is “The lines cancelled in red pencil, bought in Paris, are to stand.”) Probably there’s a tabulation somewhere of those corrections and which ones he stetted.
Joyce continued fretting about typos as more editions were printed over the next few years; given a re-typeset edition in 1926, said Sylvia Beach, he “eagerly scrutinized the first pages with the help of his two pairs of glasses plus a magnifying glass—and I heard an exclamation. Three errors already!” In negotiations with Random House for the first US edition, he requested that the text be read by an expert proof reader, which didn’t happen, and further complexities ensued.
(Before you come back with “portals of discovery”, check out the commentary on that line at The Joyce Project by John Hunt — I’m convinced by his argument.)
Thanks for that; I thought that was an odd thing for Joyce to say!
Jeri Johnson’s Oxford World Classics edition of Ulysses (a facsimile of the 1922 edition) has Joyce’s errata lists as one of its appendices.
And then there is the online critical edition of Ulysses by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon.