Literaure (for Literature)

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read” according to Oscar Wilde. Literaure fits most of the classic patterns of an opac typo in that it has a missing letter at the end of a long, familiar word. However, we find it surprisingly plentiful for a typo that does not look right on even a casual inspection. It is found on the 'B,' or High Probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases, meaning that it was present between 16 and 99 times in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. We found more than 50 when we looked today, but some of those appeared to be connected to legitimate non-English words. There were only 3 cases of Literaure in the catalog of Arizona State University today (My alma mater - Class of 1968 English Major), but one of those was in a subject heading.

Today's image shows Tintern Abbey in Southern Wales - made famous in a poem by Wordsworth.

The original photograph from the 1970's was digitized and then rendered as a painting in Photoshop. The original can be seen at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/literature.html