Found a 30 year old typo in a library book that nobody ever caught

I was looking through an old gardening guide from 1994 at the public library in Des Moines last weekend. On page 112, the caption under a picture of carrots says "pull carots when the shoulders are 1 inch wide." Someone must have written "carrots" in the margin with a pen, but the library stamp covered it up. Made me wonder how many people actually read those old books cover to cover anymore.

2 comments

2 Comments

emma_clark13d agoProlific Poster

Is it weird how satisfying it is to find stuff like that? I found a similar typo in a cookbook from 1988 at my local library, it said "add 2 cups of suagr" under a banana bread recipe. Someone actually crossed out the extra "a" with pen and wrote "corrected" in the margins. Love how people still cared about getting it right even in old books nobody probably reads anymore. Did you check the copyright page to see if it was a first edition or something?

adamgreen13d ago

That cookbook with "suagr" is exactly the kind of thing I used to roll my eyes at, lol. I thought people who corrected typos in old books were just bored and nitpicky. But finding that in a library book from the 80s, with someone's actual handwriting fixing it, kinda flipped my view. It's like a little time capsule of someone caring enough to make a tiny improvement, even if nobody was watching. Now I can't help but peek at library book margins for stuff like that. It changed my whole take on random annotations in old texts.