Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, is a temple. Although the Beinecke is cuboid it has the atmosphere of a pyramid, flanked in faintly translucent marble slabs that suck light into the building and radiate it outward at the same time.

A new literary exhibition, “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” is not at the Beinecke; it is ninety feet away in the Hanke Gallery of the Sterling Memorial Library. This other Yale library is hideous in every way that the Beinecke shines. “Gothic revival” is the generous term. In a scathing 1930 critique later published in The Nation, a Yale undergraduate, William Harlan Hale, condemned SML’s combination of ecclesiastical decor and godless floorplan as a “cathedral orgy.” “How can students be educated to artistic appreciation,” he wondered, “under the eaves of an architecture that puts water tanks into church towers, and lavatories into oriels?”

Past SML’s narthex, in a gloomy, wood-paneled corner of its nave, is a small, sarcastic show. It celebrates a loaded little pocket of publishing history: the correction. Since the later fifteenth century, publishers have inserted—or “tipped in”—a piece of paper called an erratum into books printed with a mistake noticed too late. Often titled “faults escaped in printing,” and sometimes included in a later edition as a corrections page, errata often include spelling corrections, legal retractions, errors.

No sooner had the erratum become conventional than it was exploited for fun. A page titled “Faults escaped in the printing, which a wise reader may mend when he sees them” in a 1622 satirical poem turns out to be a poem of its own: “In the last Page, for conscience, read none./In every page, read sence for nonsence.” A century and a half later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was abusing the form with glee. Some of the volumes on exhibition show him continually revising the poem “Effusion XX” post-publication—simply annoying—and using errata to critique the war in France: “Page 61, for MURDER read Fight for his King and Country.”

Practical problem-solving achieves shape and size in errata through the medium of graphic design. The slips are usually cut smaller than the volume and were sometimes pasted to the backboard. Their information appears in three to five columns of lists: page and line, “for,” the mistake, “read,” the correct word. Because every line on an erratum slip starts with a page reference, you could mistake them for sheets of anaphoric poetry at first: Where is the horse? Where is the rider? “Because of that format—you know, for X read Y—you get this poetry that’s really unexpected sometimes,” said Geoff Kaplan, a graphic designer and co-curator of the show.

In the Latin-infested parlance of the sixteenth century, an erratum technically notes a publisher’s fault; an author’s fault is conveyed via a corrigendum. The exhibition’s curators, Kaplan and the editor Rachel Churner, who co-run no place press, explained to me that they see an erratum as a kind of apology: “an attempt to hold oneself accountable,” as Kaplan put it. When you mislead readers, you must fix it, to make the world itself whole again. But an erratum, they also suggested, is at the same time a species of compliment, since you wouldn’t bother correcting a book whose mistakes didn’t matter to anybody. “We joke that it’s our own sort of redemption song,” Churner said. “We’ve made our own mistakes so many times. But look—other people have, too.”

*

The paradigmatic misprint happened to a Bible. Three little letters didn’t make it into an English printing in 1631. An incredibly dangerous joke? Satan guiding man’s hand? Either way, a whole batch of Bibles went into the world commanding, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Most of the thousand copies of “the Wicked Bible” were destroyed—burned rather than pulped, probably, since there was no pulping industry yet. The publisher, Robert Barker, lost his license from the king. Yale has one of the Wicked Bibles, on display in “Beauties of My Style,” and it’s amazing to see the typographical sin lurking in something so otherwise normative. But the Wicked Bible’s mistaken exhortation also resounds with moral implications: telling people what to do can be worse than saying nothing at all.

The title of the exhibition is from James Joyce, whose blue-covered Ulysses greets the visitor. “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of,” Joyce wrote about some words in the novel, just pre-publication. But an errata sheet ended up accompanying the 1922 first British edition, correcting hundreds of mistakes, from “Page 34, line 9, for bellied read belied” to “Page 649, line 16, for anintuitive parti coloured clown read an intuitive particoloured clown.” It also, the curators note in the show’s pamphlet, “restored some of the intentional ones (misspellings of characters’ names, for example), a fitting gesture in a book haunted by mishearing, misreading, and mistaken inference.”

It’s a lot of work to tip slips into thousands of books, but the labor is worth it if the book is worth it, and the same principle applies to unfolding unexpected bits of paper found inside. They’re beautiful things in their own right, these bits of paper. Books lie open in the show, showing off their deviance, with classic rectangles of deeply inset lines of fact exhibited nearby.

Whenever someone writes they create opportunities for poetry and emergent types of error. The books featured in “Beauties of My Style” demonstrate this principle nicely. A Wells Fargo directory from 1822 shows edited entries cut and pasted carefully over old information. A slip from a 1995 atlas of Laos corrects outdated spellings for local place names, some of which would later change again—JAKATAR becomes DJAKARTA here, but not forever. One erratum is downright sweet: “Dear Sir, or Madam, We goofed in the Appanoose County Plat Book,” write the publishers of a 1986 Iowa property map.

But most are pedantic in the style of a fussy reader who emails snippy spelling corrections. One unsigned slip in the show notes that a 2004 translation by Ken Knabb of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) was not in fact authorized at all; also, Chapter 2 starts wrong. Sometimes the typography of the errata itself seems to be contributing to the sarcastic tone, as in the styling of one corrective volume by the religious author Thomas Ward:

THE

E R R A T A

TO THE

Proteſtant Bible

OR THE

T    R    U    T    H

OF THEIR

Engliſh Tranſlations Examin’d.

Publishing is a terrifying business precisely because mistakes are inevitable. The feeling of realizing that you’ve printed something wrong is a distinctively leaden panic, like a torsal blow from a Le Creuset, like no other type of fear. Full of aberrant books, SML’s Hanke Gallery feels as cocoon-like as a publisher’s panic attack, while across the way the Beinecke’s architectural perfection expresses the human being’s will towards understanding.

Though the word is used, occasionally, in the sense of a mistake in life generally (Benjamin Franklin called abandoning his brother in Boston “one of the first Errata of my Life”), errata have remained mostly a feature of print. To err is human, Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Criticism. To be forgiven, you might need a slip.