Booty Betooty

Here’s my advice to all you careless fellow Americans: be careful what you set down in black and white. An editor I know from the Shakespeare group we both belong to gathered up this collection of misprints from over the years.I loved this man Max Hall. Yet for all the care he took to watch what he was leaving behind, really what he most believed in was living life forward: Once, when we took a break in our reading he rose to stretch his legs and, returning to his seat, lost his footing and sat down hard; blinked once, got up and resumed his spirited reading of the part of Falstaff. When I complimented him later on his quick ‘recover’ he smiled delightedly and said “I’m 97 years old!” as if being 97 was somehow the very reason he bounced back so fast.An extended version of that smile appears in this collection of boo-boos, typos and misprints, all made because a series of ‘somebodys’ didn’t go back over the copy one last time.One of his favorites came from a review of the play Harvey which tells the story of a drunk and the imaginary hare only he can see. The misprint said the guy was as followed around by a six-foot-tall white rabbi.He also cites the time an edition of the Washington Post went out with the headline “FDR IN BED WITH CO-ED” (He was actually in bed with a cold.) Also, the time the Naval Academy took delivery of 900 diplomas to be handed out to the graduates at the next day’s  commencement exercises - only to find that “naval” had been spelled with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’ - like the bellybutton.This last story says it all about Max, who, I have just learned, died only days ago at the ripe old age of 100: “When my friend Robert Fort was appointed Beauty Editor of the Emory University Yearbook in the early 1930s a misprinted headline in the Emory Wheel made him the ‘Betuty’ Editor.’ For the rest of his life his friends called him ‘Betuty.’”Betooty: a great name. (Ah  human error. What a dull place the world would be without it!)

Somebody get that copy editor a drink of water!