This week's edition of the New York Times Book Review has an interesting essay about corrections, and the lack thereof, in books. No doubt the article was inspired by Seth Mnookin's decision to include corrections in the paperback version of his book. (You can read our interview with him here.) The article has one particularly interesting section about how uncorrected errors can continue to be repeated for decades:
But even small errors can lead to large problems. "The historical error can be very much like the virus that spreads from book to book," Chernow said. He cites a line attributed to Hamilton in books for 150 years - "Your people, sir - your people is a great beast!" - which he said has since been shown to be hearsay reported 71 years after it was supposedly uttered.
Falsehoods like these seep into the record, infecting newspapers and magazines, which often rely on books as main sources. Marshall said that when an excerpt from her book was published in The New Yorker, the magazine's fact-checkers relied heavily on books she knew were flawed. "Any book already in print they considered authoritative," she said, "but because my book was not in print it was not given the same credibility."
We would also be remiss if we neglected to point out that this article has a correction of its own:
An essay on Page 39 of the Book Review today, about books with errors that are not corrected, misidentified the American publisher that withdrew "Honor Lost," ostensibly a memoir about a Jordanian woman murdered for having married a Christian. It was published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc., not Simon & Schuster (which is another division of the parent corporation, Simon & Schuster Inc.). Link
