Bamk* (for Bank*)

A friend recently told me about the time that Redbank, a bank located mostly in New Jersey, opened an office in Long Branch. He added: "The article I read about this asked whether we could call it the Long Branch branch of the Redbank bank." I just glanced down at the op-ed page in our local newspaper and saw the headline: "Savings buildings saves city's history." I'm pretty sure that first word should be saving—unless the buildings they're talking about are savings banks, and in that case, you'd still have to change the word "saves" to "save." Unfortunately, I couldn't find a decent typo for savings to save my life, but I thought maybe I could bank on banking instead. Not exactly a treasure trove there, either, but I did eventually find five cases of Bamk* in OhioLINK (two of which were possibly correctly spelled personal names) and 302 in WorldCat. You might make sussing this one out a bit easier by doing separate searches on Bamks and Bamking. There were nine hits each on both of those in WorldCat, but let's face it, this is not a particularly rich typo, nor one that will probably garner a lot of interest. But should you happen to find one of these in your own library's catalog, it would certainly be worth making a withdrawal. Which is apparently what the characters in the 1895 play The War of Wealth were attempting to do in a "run on the bank" following the Panic of 1893.

(Poster for The War of Wealth by Charles Turner Dazey, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid