Hadyn (for Haydn)

One of the comments following an online article about the front-page typo(s) "Let is snow, let is snow, let is snow" from the Brattleboro (Vermont) Reformer read as follows: "This isn't newspaper-related and it's kind of geeky, but my favorite typo came from a CD booklet. It was a classical CD so not in the widest circulation, but it was the Cleveland Orchestra, which is/was one of the giants, and it was a prominent release for them on some big label which presumably employed copy editors. Anyway it was a CD of symphonies by Haydn and they spelled Haydn wrong on the cover of the CD. And it was one of those designs that was just a field of color and then big text in bold contrasting colors: Cleveland Orchestra / Symphonies 102, 103, 104 / Hadyn..." Franz Joseph Haydn is considered the "father" of the symphony, or the string quartet, or even of classical music itself, and though he lived more than 200 years ago, he's certainly no has-been, or even had-byn. There were 58 cases of Hadyn in OhioLINK today, and 507 in WorldCat. If you combine both Hadyn and Haydn, you get 20 hits in the former and 149 in the lattter. So let's make Hay here while the sun shines and make sure we've all got the name of Mozart's close friend and Beethoven's music teacher properly spelled in our catalogs.

(Haydn portrait on German stamp, 1959, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid