Anybody who’s ever written anything for publication, or even an interoffice memo for that matter, has been victimized by the typo. Here you have this beautiful thing that you’ve struggled over until it’s the best you can make it, and your labor goes down in flames because of one satanic typo. When the new LJ issue arrives at our office, we all joyfully inspect our latest creation like proud parents, and sometimes our baby is pink and perfect and sometimes it’s a changeling child from a horror movie. We all look daggers at each other wondering how everything from a multipage feature article to a one-paragraph review could have been read and re-read and re-read again by a handful of supposedly skilled editors and nobody caught that one miserable, issue-wrecking typo! Logically you understand that you shouldn’t be embarrassed and that a certain level of error is acceptable and your sins will be forgiven, but, regardless, you go from feeling like you should start writing your Pulitzer acceptance to wanting to put a pistol in your mouth.
So when perusing my Google alerts this morning, this beaut caught my eye: "Library management names new dead." It certainly sounded more interesting than another summer reading program story, so I clicked through to see that "dead" should be "dean." The story was about Gwen Alexander being named the new dean at Emporia State University School of Library and Information Management. It’s only one little letter, but that is a hell of a typo, and my heart goes out to the person who wrote it.
Oh, and mazel tov, Gwen. A long life to you.
