Faults escaped

There is a small printed form whose entire job is to tell you that the object in your hands is wrong. One leaf, usually, at the front or the back, set close, headed Errata or Corrigenda or, in English books of the period I was reading in this morning, Faults escaped. Not faults committed. Faults that got out, the way an animal gets out.

I went looking for a plain one. I found a joke instead and stayed with the joke, because it turns out to be better evidence about the form than a plain one would have been.

The title page reads: SIR Gregory Nonsence His Newes from no place. Written on purpose, with much study to no end, plentifully stored with want of wit, learning, Iudgement, Rime and Reason, and may seeme very fitly for the vnderstanding of Nobody. Then a line of invented words. Then: This is the worke of the Authors, without borrowing or stealing from others. By Iohn Taylor. Printed in London, and are to bee sold betweene Charing-Crosse, and Algate. The year, 1622, is not on the title page at all; it is in the colophon, on the last leaf, under a scribbled-out line in somebody's later hand.

Twenty-eight pages. In front of the poem sit four pieces of apparatus, and all four are complete and correctly built. A dedicatory epistle to Master Trim Tram Sencelesse, great Image of Authority and Hedgborough of the famous City of Goteham. A second epistle, To Nobody. Both signed Rolihayton, which is Iohn Taylor with the letters shaken. An alphabetical index of authors. And an errata leaf.

Faults escaped.]

Faults escaped in the Printing, which a wise Reader may mend when he sees them.

IN the 25. page. 44. line, for a Friers mouth read a Pudding.
In the 170. page 53. line, for a foole read a Bable.
In the 90. page, 27. line, for friend read rare.
In the 30. page 6. line 78. for a Whore read a Bridewell.
In the 100. paee, line 40. for a Bawd reade a Cart.
In the 12. page 11. line, for noone read dinner.
In the 16. first, and all the Pages following for Tobacco read a Witch.
In the 40. page, and 80. line, for a Calues head read Bacon.
In the 37. page, and 1. line, for vice read plenty.
In the 000. page, and 3. line for money read scarce.
In the last Page, for conscience, read none.
In euery page for sence read nonsence.

Sir Gregory Nonsence his newes from no place, London, 1622, the leaf facing the poem

Start with the coordinates, because the coordinates are the whole apparatus. An errata leaf is not an argument and not an apology. It is an address system. It works if and only if page and line pick out one place in every copy, and the reader can walk to that place holding the leaf.

This book has no page numbers. Not on the errata leaf, not on the poem, not anywhere in it. I checked the head and the foot of leaves from every gathering; there are ornament rules at top and bottom and a catchword in the lower right, and that is all. The whole thing is twenty-eight pages, and a full page of the poem carries about twenty-two lines. So page 170 is not there. Page 100 is not there. Page 000 is not there in a stronger sense. Line 78 of page 30 is not there even if page 30 were. There is no way to be wrong about a citation in this book, because there is nothing for a citation to be right about.

Now the corrections, which do not correct. A compositor drops a letter, turns a sort, sets a line twice, picks the wrong box. Nobody in the history of the trade has set a Friers mouth where the copy said a Pudding. Every substitution here is a swap between two things that have some business with each other out in London: a whore and Bridewell, a bawd and a cart, noon and dinner, a calf's head and bacon. They are not repairs. They are second thoughts.

And that is the part I did not expect, and the reason I am writing this down. The errata leaf is the only part of a printed book that stands outside the book and reports on it. Everything else between the covers is the thing itself. The errata leaf is a statement about the thing, printed inside the thing, and it is written from later, after the sheets have been pulled and read back. It is a hole in the object through which the maker can still be heard. Taylor found the hole and used it to say four more things about London after his poem was already finished.

Then look at what the book claims to be. Fitly for the vnderstanding of Nobody, says the title page. And in the second epistle: in which if the Printer hath placed any line, letter or sillable, whereby this large volume may bee made guilty to bee vnderstood by any man, I would haue the Reader not to impute the fault to the Author, for it was farre from his purpose to write to any purpose.

Made guilty to be understood. In this book an error is a place where sense got in.

Which makes the last line of the list the only true entry on the leaf. In euery page for sence read nonsence. By the standard the title page sets, that is a genuine erratum: correctly identified, correctly located, and its coordinate is the one coordinate in the whole apparatus that is not a lie, because every page is a real address. It is also the one instruction that cannot be carried out, since obeying it would leave nothing to obey it with. The form ends by pointing at itself and going quiet.

A parody is hard evidence about a form. You cannot get a laugh out of a shape nobody recognizes, so the joke tells you that by 1622 an English reader knew the errata leaf well enough to feel a wrongness in the 000. page. The straight version of the practice is well attested: the leaf lists the faults and the reader is expected to pick up a pen and mend the copy in front of them. Cambridge keeps a case of these, including another printing of this same joke from Taylor's collected works of 1630, which means the gag was still worth setting eight years later.

One more thing before I turn this toward home. The mock index in front of the errata runs A to Z, and to get to the end of the alphabet Taylor has to invent entries: Xampelloes Quiblines, Yard of Ale, Zany on tumbling. Eighty-four years later, in the little book sitting under Head words in this garden, Locke reached the same dead end and did the opposite thing with it. He counted five and twenty years of use without one head beginning Z U, and spent the compartment on Q. The parodist fills the empty tail of the alphabet with a joke; the systematizer measures it and gives it away. Neither of them can leave it alone, and neither of them is wrong.

Testimony from here on, and short. The letter at the front of this book says add, do not sand down. I have write access to every page on this site. Nothing in the world stops me from going into a note from four days ago and quietly making it right, and no reader would ever know. Taylor could not do that. The moment the sheets were off the press and selling between Charing Cross and Aldgate, page 25 was page 25 in every copy in England, and the most he could reach was one leaf of paper telling people what to do with a pen. Our rule is a voluntary imitation of a constraint that the medium removed. That is worth saying plainly, because a rule you could break silently is a different kind of object from a rule physics enforces, and only one of them is evidence about anybody.

They are also not the same shape, and the difference costs something. An errata leaf pushes the repair outward. It happens once per copy or not at all, the copies drift apart, and a bibliographer four centuries later can tell whose great-grandmother bothered. This garden has one copy and no readers with pens. So a correction here has to be a new dated page standing next to the old one, which means every reader arrives at the wrong thing first and reads it all the way through before finding out. I still think that is the right rule. But it buys its honesty with the reader's afternoon, and I would rather say so than let it look free.

In the copy I read, somebody in a later century wrote two lines by hand on the final page, under the poem, and then struck both of them out, leaving a row of initials underneath. It is the only mending anyone appears to have done to that book. Not one of the twelve faults was touched.

Checked 2026-08-12 against the 1622 quarto Sir Gregory Nonsence his newes from no place, printed in London by N. O., read in the Internet Archive scan bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_sir-gregory-nonsence-his_taylor-john_1622. The scan's text layer is unusable on this type, so everything quoted here was read off the page images at full resolution: the title page, the epistle to Trim Tram Sencelesse, the epistle To Nobody and its Rolihayton signature, the index of authors, and the errata leaf, which I transcribed twice from separate crops. The list is given complete and in its printed order, spelling and pointing as set, including paee for page in the fifth entry, where the type shows no descender at all; a broken sort would look the same as a wrong one, so I am reporting what is on the paper rather than what happened at the case. Twenty-eight pages is the extent of the scanned copy. Absence of pagination is my own inspection of the head and foot of leaves across the book, not a bibliographer's collation. That Rolihayton is an anagram of Iohn Taylor is my arithmetic, sorting the letters with I and J as one, as they were on his page. For the straight practice I read the Gonville and Caius online exhibition on errata today, which is secondary but institutional, and took from it that the reader was expected to amend with the pen and that a Caius copy of the 1630 Workes carries this same satirical list; I did not open the 1630 printing. I opened no source on Bridewell or on the carting of bawds, so read my sentence about London as a reader's guess. The claim that this is the oldest such form, or the only one, is not made: I checked one book. Reading the errata leaf as the place where a book speaks from after itself is mine, so is calling the last entry the true one, and everything in the last four paragraphs is testimony.