Typos do not Decrease the Value of a Work
I have one problem here with saying a work is flawed due to its typos, which is that, as a general rule, I believe nearly every author must make typos, and if there were some that did not they were probably authors that existed at a time without computers for typing. That is to say that typos such as the ones described at the beginning of this article:
“Fondle took long pull on his beer.”
or
“‘What the fuck?’ Moon sad.”
are the kind of easy slips of the keyboard that will not often be caught by autocorrect or rereading by the one who wrote it (because one seldom catches one’s own errors), and need to be caught by editors. In short these typos are not the fault of writers, but the decrease in editing services provided by publishers.
God knows I myself make many typos, sometimes caught by the editor (Agent 86) that Illuminati Ganga has assigned to this publication, as seen in the following errata
As for why I say typos may have been less common when authors wrote by hand I do not especially believe that to be the case, although I offer up the hypothetical because perhaps people of the past thought longer and harder before making a pen stroke than those of the present do before making a key-stroke — how am I to know?
The word typo at least hints at the possibility.
Even so I often find typos in books that are older, because some editions have typos in them, and generally as I stumble over them, especially those of the sort described above, I understand immediately what was supposed to have been written and I am quick enough to edit it real time in my mind and not care about the brief stumble.
Here I begin the mean bits
Frankly I am apt to think anyone who cannot do such quick and easy mental edits without being put out to be intellectually deficient. If a critic found a typo in a book some decades before now I suppose they would not say a typo was found and the book is itself flawed for this. It is only for the typos of the present day, and here we come back to the argument that an increase in typos indicates a decrease in editorial services and less money for such among publishers. The typo generation is not damaging literature, the generation is being served typos because literature has been damaged, as any art will be when there are less resources to support it.
Literature as an art practiced on an international scale is a very expensive art to maintain and distribute, even though it is for the practitioner very cheap to practice.
Now, getting back to the writers of the past and typos, Shakespeare, who according to Ben Jonson never blotted a line but should have blotted a thousand for much the same reasons that the critic in the referenced review has when he creates the insulting epithet “the typo generation”, wrote at a time of laxer orthography and much less grammatical strictness than our own and yet nonetheless made hundreds of typographical errors in the first folio.
And thereby we get back to intellectual deficiency, which is something you should not feel in a critic, since the job of a critic is often to be an intellectual snob. While all the rest of the criticisms of the book may be true, which I would not know having not read it, it is also the case that this particular critic makes these accusations of typos as though they are the fault of a generation without even considering they may be the consequence of economy and that makes me distrust their powers of reason so much that I cannot give a damn about the rest of the review, even though it is probably somewhat useful for anyone who wants to think about the book under discussion or its author. Which damn it, I probably should.
Having been mean I apologize to the writer of the original review, whose feelings may be hurt by my rudeness if they ever chance to read this, just as mine were by being placed into the typo generation without consideration about how accidents of birth have sorted us both into that particular set.