One book's typographical errors landed a Belfast bookseller in court, writes Fionola Meredith.
Typos are the bane of editors' lives, irritating little mistakes that somehow manage to pass even the most eagle-eyed proof-readers, and end up appearing in print. Most typographical errors are fairly trivial, often involving a word accidentally misspelled or left out. Sometimes they can be amusing: famously, the 1631 edition of the King James Bible printed the stern commandment "thou shalt commit adultery", while a printer error in the 1716 version turned Christ's instruction "Go, and sin no more" to the rather more racy "Go, and sin on more".
But this week saw the extraordinary case of a Belfast bookseller being taken to court by a disgruntled customer - over a small number of errors in a book he sold her. Former Queen's University finance student Grainne McElroy was so aggrieved at the mistakes she found in the £46 (€69) academic textbook that she attempted to sue David Torrans, who owns No Alibis bookshop. After a 20-minute hearing in Enniskillen Crown Court on Tuesday morning, the case was dismissed by the judge.
The store, on the city's Botanic Avenue, is a favourite haunt of writers, poets and academics, who are often to be found browsing the shelves, or flicking through a book with a steaming mug of coffee in hand. Students buy academic textbooks there too, and it was just before the start of the university year, in 2005, that McElroy called in to pick up a copy of the set text for her undergraduate finance course. It was this book - a weighty 1,000-page tome entitled Financial Theory and Corporate Policy, by Thomas E Copeland, J Fred Weston and Kuldeep Shastri, published by Pearson Education - that McElroy claimed was "defective, of unsatisfactory quality and not fit for the purpose for which it is intended". The book, which is regarded as the classic textbook in its field, is recommended as course reading by Prof Michael Moore of the School of Management and Economics at Queen's.
Torrans was bewildered by the claim: he has sold around 120 copies of the book over the last three years, and says that no other student has ever complained about the few errors it contains. Despite her difficulties with the book, McElroy subsequently graduated with a first class honours degree.
ALTHOUGH RELIEVED ATthe judge's verdict, Torrans feels frustrated at the time and energy he was forced to devote to the case - and the potential threat to his shop. "You can't help but fear the consequences for your business when you come up against this sort of thing. No matter how confident you are that you are in the right, being taken to court is daunting. The most worrying thing is the uncertainty."
And it's not just Torrans who is left feeling vulnerable. The unique court case has sent ripples of disquiet through the independent bookselling world in Britain and Ireland. In a market dominated by large chains, the financial position of independent booksellers is increasingly fragile, even without the threat of legal action. Many bookshops have had to close already, squeezed out by supermarkets - who control 10 per cent of the market - selling books for a few cents.
"I've never heard of a case like this happening before," says Aisling Cunningham, of Cathach Rare Books in Dublin. Editorial consultant Dermott Barrett is equally incredulous: "For someone to instigate legislation - that's really extreme," he says.
Des Kenny, of Kenny's Bookshop in Galway, has personal experience of the perils of proof-reading. "We have published a few books over the years," he says, "and in one case, when I was going through the manuscript of a very heavy historical book, I realised I was correcting my own previous proof-reading mistakes. It's a total nightmare."
But Kenny believes that there is no way booksellers can take responsibility for typographical errors in the texts they sell: "If there are typos in a book, the seller has nothing to do with it. Take it to its logical conclusion -
if you're handling thousands of books, who's going to go through each and every one to check them for typos?"
Small printing errors really are unavoidable, according to Tony Farmar, president of Clé, the Irish Book Publishers' Association. "There has never been a book published without typos. There are a few cases where they seriously do matter - for instance, a text containing science experiments for schools. But the bookseller should take no responsibility for typos - how could it possibly be part of their duty of care to the customer?"
Des Kenny recalls an anecdote his father used to tell about the ancient Chinese practice of inserting one deliberate mistake into intricately-wrought manuscripts. Why? Because to achieve perfection was considered to be "flying in the face of God". It seems clear that the publication of books is an inevitably flawed art. Luckily for independent booksellers, that's a fact that most members of the book-buying public are willing to accept.