By now it will be presumably be hard to get uncorrected copies of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom, forty-six million printed pages of which were pulped last weekend after the author discovered that they were riddled with errors. Viewers of Friday’s ‘Newsnight Review’ were treated to a delightful bit of footage (sadly not yet available on Youtube) in which the author stopped in the middle of the extract he was reading to camera, declared that his English copy was full of mistakes, and uttered a heartfelt expletive. In a faraway printing firm, the hand that double-clicked the wrong computer file was doubtless being slapped, hard.

So far as I’m aware, none of the reviews–even those in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, which dared to suggest that Franzen’s was not the novel-to-end-all-novels–mentioned the typos and unrevised passages that got the author’s goat (either they were skimming, or they had been sent the American edition). The British press, which is not renowned for its ability to resist a good pun, mostly neglected to point out that Franzen’s previous bestseller had been entitled ‘The Corrections’. But the papers did dredge up some fine examples of previous pulpings, including a Pasta Bible that told readers to add ‘salt and freshly ground black people’ to their tagliatelle, and the ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631 which instructed, between ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steale’, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’. (The last was apparently an act of industrial sabotage, rather than a mistake).

In Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), the snaky monster Error spews out ‘vomit full of bookes and papers’ when she is vanquished by a passing knight in shining armour. Outside the world of poetry, she’s clearly still on the rampage.