The Yale Library in Connecticut, United States, presents “Beauties of My Style,” an exhibition that explores the errors in printed books over the last 500 years.

Your mistakes of today might be the museum exhibits of tomorrow: it has happened to all of us that, while writing a text, whether it be this article, school work, or an email, we suddenly miss a letter or misspell a word. I had never stopped to think that for future anthropologists and scholars of the past, these errata could mean more than just carelessness, as demonstrated by the new exhibition at the Yale Library (located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States).

The curators of this exhibit, Rachel Churner and Geoff Kaplan, explored the archive of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and gathered a collection of texts with spelling mistakes, missing commas, and extra symbols (to mention a few common errors), as well as correction sheets that were printed on already published texts. "Beauties of My Style," which is the name of the exhibition, includes everything from poorly made maps to religious texts with errors that would make any literature professor's blood pressure rise. Or something like that.

The centerpiece of this collection of historical human errors dating back more than five hundred years is a correction sheet for James Joyce’s "Ulysses," which catalogs over 200 mistakes in the 1922 edition. Because, yes, before the digital age, when it wasn't as simple to correct a manuscript as opening it in Word and changing a character, publishing houses included sheets that pointed out all the errors found within their volumes. Very vintage.

Among all the mistakes cataloged throughout history, the most relevant in "Beauties of My Style" (a title that, incidentally, comes from a phrase said by James Joyce himself: “These are not misprints. but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of”) is that of the Wicked Bible of 1631; in the printing run of 1,000 copies, the Seventh Commandment read "Thou shalt commit adultery." The printers of this edition had to pay an enormous fine for forgetting to include the word "not." A small thing; they only made a mistake when publishing the words of God in one of the most important doctrines of the Catholic and Christian religion (if you are interested, there are still about 20 of the Sinners’ Bibles circulating around the world and their value can reach $40,000 dollars).

Before finishing this article, I would like to add a small note about the name of the exhibit: the phrase they based the name on, "These are not misprints, but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of," was said by Joyce to his editor to defend his writing style, since when he sent his manuscripts full of wordplay and linguistic deformations, those who read it took it for granted that the writer had made error after error while drafting.

The "Beauties of My Style" exhibition will be available at the Yale Library until September 6 of this year, so if you're in the area, don't hesitate to visit.