Mix-ups Aplenty

What follows are some of those mix-ups, culled from An Embarrassment of Misprints:

• "In the spring of 1990 the United States Naval Academy presented 990 diplomas to its graduating class with `Naval' spelled `Navel.' A representative of the Academy told me the flawed documents arrived from the printer the day before the ceremony, and there was nothing to do but hand them out. A corrected version was later sent to each graduate."

• "According to a history of the Washington Post, that paper once printed this headline on the front page of its first edition: FDR IN BED WITH COED. Actually President Roosevelt was in bed with a cold, as the story made clear. Chalmers Roberts, author of the history, wrote that this misprint probably occurred in 1940, and that the President phoned the paper and ordered a hundred copies to send to his friends. But Roosevelt didn't get his copies, because the circulation department had scurried around to retrieve the edition and shred it."

• "On January 18, 1961, the International Edition of the New York Times, published in London, referred to [the Archbishop of Canterbury] as the `red-nosed Archbishop' (meaning `red-robed')."

• "W.B. Yeats, in his poem `Among School Children,' mentioned Plato and then `solider Aristotle,' but the printer made it `soldier Aristotle.' That version went unchanged in several printings of Yeats's complete poems while he was still alive, suggesting that he may have decided he could live with `soldier.' In the edition of 1947, eight years after his death, `solider Aristotle' was substituted."

• "When my friend Randolph Fort [who went on to be editor of Emory Magazine] was appointed Beauty Editor of the Emory University Yearbook in the early 1930s, a misprinted headline in the Emory Wheel made him the `Betuty Editor.' For the rest of his life his friends called him `Betuty.' "