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.
James Joyce, (1922). Courtesy of Yale University Library.
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.
“What we found was that errata sheets were not only spaces for corrections but also sites of humor, legal maneuvering, and reinterpretation,” she said. “With this exhibition, we wanted to share ways in which even small corrections can reshape meaning and authority.”
Errata slip from James Joyce, (1922). Courtesy of Yale University Library.
A Catalogue of Errors
The show is anchored by Ulysses’s extensive errata sheet. Far from just a log of more than 200 mistakes, the document “extends the book beyond the body of the text,” Churner said, while shedding light on the hidden negotiations between an author, editor, and printer. Some of the novel’s mistakes, for instance, emerge from a proofreader’s standardization of things like characters’ names, which Joyce later decided to do away with.
Other misprints in the exhibition are less beauties of style, though. The 2004 translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Ken Knabb was heralded as the “new authorized translation,” but for a scrap of paper tucked between the pages that revealed that it was actually unauthorized. Another errata slip clarifies the many mislabelings in a 1846 map of vistas along the Hudson River, which also incorrectly lists the population of Fishkill Village as 11,000 (it was 800).
Errata slip from Guy Debord, , translated by Ken Knabb (2004). Courtesy of Yale University Library.
The most scandalous typo, however, occurs in the so-called Wicked Bible from 1631. The printing’s Seventh Commandment infamously reads “Thou shalt commit adultery”—a gaffe “considered so egregious that no correction would suffice,” Churner said. Most of the thousand-print run was destroyed, while the printers were hauled into court, fined, and stripped of their license.
Today, surviving copies of the Wicked Bible number around 20, scattered across institutions in the U.S. and U.K.; one sold for more than $40,000 in 2015 and another was discovered in New Zealand in 2024. In the Beinecke’s copy, the word “not” has been daintily added by hand.
Errata slip in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s hand in the (1796). Courtesy of Yale University Library.
Errata has also been deployed as a political tool. Churner pointed out how the Reformation saw the publication of whole books listing “mis-translations” of Protestant and Catholic bibles, “mobilizing the errata well beyond a list of typographic corrections.” Conversely, there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose 1795 volume Conciones Ad Populum, or Addresses to the People contains the pointed erratum: “Page 61, for MURDER read fight for the King and Country.”
The Shared Work of Print
In our digital era, when corrections can be made quickly and almost imperceptibly, errata sheets are almost obsolete artifacts. But they remain resonant for laying bare the process of correction, while sounding a note of accountability. One such example in the exhibition comes from publisher R.C. Booth Enterprise, which pointed out an error in its 1986 book of Iowa maps with an errata slip that admits: “We goofed.”
(1986). Courtesy of Yale University Library.
Ultimately, these pages of amendments reveal how print publishing is a collective project. Beyond involving authors, editors, proofreaders, and printers, it also enlisted readers—with some errata slips even asking them to correct the text by hand. It is a rare glimpse into the shared labor behind a book, made visible only through a catalogue of mistakes.
“This little addition,” said Churner, “reminds us that the authority of the written word is not a given, but that we can participate in it.”
“‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake” is on view March 30–September 6, 2026 at the Sterling Memorial Library’s Hanke Gallery at Yale University, 120 High Street, New Haven, Connecticut.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
