Edgar Allen Poe (for Edgar Allan Poe)

Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Edgar Allan Poe wrote on both.

Poe is most famous for his poetry (The Raven) and short stories (The Masque of the Red Death), but the horror writer was also once an aspiring playwright. His only play, the tragedy Politian, was poorly received, and Poe quickly returned to shorter works.

If you did a double take upon reading the play’s title, I can assure you, Politian is not a typo for Politician—it is the name of the protagonist. The author’s name, however, frequently causes troubles for catalogers, with Allan often misspelled as Allen—this is a high probability typo on the Ballard list, and has over 1000 hits in Worldcat.

Leanne Olson

(Raven image from animals.howstuffworks.com)

Pscy* (for Psychic, Psychological, etc.)

What could be better on Halloween than a story about the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe?  While trolling for lesser-known facts about the author, I came across something appropriately eerie that might even be new to many of you.  In 1862, psychic medium Lizzie Doten published her book Poems from the Inner Life.  In it, she claimed some of the works originated from “conscious communion with disembodied spirits” of famous writers who had shuffled off this mortal coil.  (Indeed, Shakespeare was one of them.) Six of the poems are purported to come from Poe himself. About her experience with the spirit of Poe, Doten had this to say:

The influence of Poe was neither pleasant nor easy. I can only describe it as a species of mental intoxication. I was tortured with a feeling of great restlessness and irritability, and strange, incongruous images crowded my brain. Some were as bewildering and dazzling as the sun, others dark and repulsive.  Under his influence, particularly, I suffered the greatest exhaustion of vital energy, so much so, that after giving one of his poems, I was usually quite ill for several days.

But from his first poem to the last … was a marked, and rapid change. It would seem as though, in that higher life, where the opportunities for spiritual development far transcend those of earth, that by his quick and active perceptions he had seized upon the Divine Idea which was endeavoring to find expression through his life, both in Time and Eternity; and that from the moment this became apparent, with a volcanic energy, with the battle-strokes of a true hero, he had over-thrown every obstacle, and hewn a way through every barrier that impeded the free out-growth and manifestation of his diviner self…. As he last appeared to me, he was full of majesty and strength, self-poised and calm, and it would seem by the expression of his countenance, radiant with victory, that the reward promised to ‘him that over-cometh,' had been made his sure possession…. Upon earth he was a meteor light, flashing with a startling brilliancy across the intellectual firmament; but now he is a star of ever increasing magnitude, which has at length gravitated to its own place among the celestial spheres.

As Ripley’s would have it, “Believe It or Not!”  But there’s no doubt that Pscy* is a typo of high probability.  There are 61 English-language instances of it in OhioLINK and 502 in WorldCat.

(Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, 1849, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Resurce*, etc. (for Resource*)

We've blogged about Edgar Allan Poe here several times before, but given the breaking news last week that Edgar may not have been as lugubrious as all that (along with reports of the missing Poe Toaster), let's do it again now, shall we? (Last Tuesday marked the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth.) The Raven opens with Poe's protagonist moodily musing about his "lost love" Lenore:

Eagerly I wished the morrow;
Vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow,
Sorrow for the lost Lenore....

She also turns up in two other poems by Poe (the first being "A Paean" in 1831), so people are wont to wonder, who was Lenore? According to one theory, "Lenore" is a recurring reference to Poe's older brother, William Henry Leonard Poe. Edgar lionized Henry, writing: "There can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother—it is not so much that they love one another as that they both love the same parent." Henry was a sailor for most of his short life and, just like "Anabel Lee," was buried by the sea. (It's also quite possible that Poe was simply partial to the name, either for poetic reasons or personal ones.) And what, pray tell, is surcease? One of Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day words last week, it was defined there as: "stoppage, especially a temporary one; to bring or come to an end. Etymology: From Middle English sursesen/surcesen, via French from Latin supersedere (to refrain from), from super- + sedere (to sit). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sed- (to sit) that is also the source of sit, chair, saddle, assess, assiduous, sediment, soot, cathedral, and tetrahedron. The word cease is unrelated, though its spelling has influenced the word." We got 27 hits on Resurce*, 15 on Resorce*, and one on Resuorce* in OhioLINK today. So let's refrain from sitting on our resources and start assessing how they're spelled.

From our books, surcease of Resurce*
Sorrow for the lost Resorce*
—Edgar A. Typoe

(The Poe Toaster, by Maggie Schreiter, from the Quiltart Raven Challenge website.)

Carol Reid

August 20, 2007 - Poerty

In a nod to "Bad Poetry Day" (August 18), the typo for today is Poerty. I found eight of 'em lurking in OhioLINK, which makes it a typo of "moderate probability." The Ballard list also includes Poetrical and Poetery, ranking their likelihood as of the "low" and "lowest" kind. In an example of decidedly not bad poetry, the eponymous Raven is fond of saying "Nevermore," but that's something we can really never say. Though our collective Muse might wish us to banish these typos forevermore, the best we can guarantee is to be on our guard against them. Edgar Allan Poe once said that a poem should be written "for the poem's sake," so for Poe's sake, let's try and provide the best bibliographic access to poetry we can. Beware as well the common misapprehension (Allen for Allan) when you ponder his middle name, there being well over 100 dreary cases in OhioLINK of this forgotten lore.

Carol Reid

Stret + Street (for Street or Stret)

Alfred Billings Street has been referred to as the "State Poet-Librarian of Albany," a lovely-sounding if informal moniker for a man who was not only the New York State Librarian from 1848 to 1862, along with being the State Law Librarian until 1868, but was also a lifelong wordsmith. (He was once gently mocked as "the forest child in shape of ALFRED STREET!" by Edgar Allan Poe in his pseudonymous book The Poets and Poetry of America: A Satire). Ironically named, perhaps, Mr. Street was an evident nature lover and rather romantic bard to boot. In Frontenac: Or, the Atotarho of the Iroquois; a Metrical Romance, he wrote:

Sweet, sylvan lake! that isle of thine
Is like one hope through grief to shine;
Is like one tie our life to cheer;
Is like one flower when all is sere;
One ray amid the tempest’s might;
One star amid the gloom of night.

A portrait of Alfred Billings Street, by Asa Twitchell, currently hangs in the Librarians Room at the New York State Library in Albany, where it joins that of Melvil Dewey and a couple other former State Librarians. There were eight instances of Stret + Street (for street or stret) found in OhioLINK today, and 172 in WorldCat. You may turn up a few correctly spelled non-English names and words with this one, but you should also find some genuine typos here.

(Alfred Billings Street, engraving by Welch & Walter, circa 1850, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

June 22, 2007 - Micorf*

When I was in library school, I had the good fortune of being introduced to the idea of intellectual freedom—and delight in the field in general—by the former dean, a wonderfully eccentric gentleman who was once dubbed the "most verbose" library science professor in the country. One day in class he expressed his reservations about microforms in the following fragment (with implied apologies to Edgar Allan Poe):

Microforms are akin to a midden
And have their ghastly origins
In the rank miasma of the tarn.

The Ballard list includes Micorf* in its "highest probability" section; Micoform, Micrform, and Microfom in its "high probability" section; Micoro*, Microfirm, Microforn, and Mocrofirm in its "moderate probability" section; and quite a few other tiny-related typos wafting their way through the rest of the list. (Note that some of these could mean either microform or microfilm.) Wipe out one or two each day so you don't get swamped.

Carol Reid

Evelat* (for Elevat* or Revelat*)

It's been known to happen before in my building, but in more than thirty years there, it had never happened to me. While I was working at the library a couple of weeks ago, I got trapped in the elevator. Ironically, I didn't even have my crossword puzzle with me as I was just going down to to the lobby to meet a friend who had stopped by to view an exhibit a coworker and I had recently installed about the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs. Incidentally, I hope that those elevated conveyances at the World's Fair worked a little better than this scary ride in my own fair world! (Um, no offense there, Elly. You're usually a delight.) I was kind of glad at first that there was no one in there with me. No overly chatty or panicky coworkers, no sketchy or bitchy patrons (it happens). But then there was nobody there to keep me company either. I suppose the worst part was having nothing to read, and the best part was not having had to pee. I recited Kubla Khan, first to myself and then out loud, and then tried a few other poems I had once had down, though it seems not so much anymore. When it came to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, after stumbling through the verse that starts out, "Ah, distinctly, I remember," I found that I no longer could. (It was bleak in there, but it wasn't December.) Getting stuck on stanzas started to make me think of getting stuck between floors, so I finally sat down and began writing this blog entry instead. Although quite the revelation, in a way, the whole thing was really just boring, if perhaps no more boring, really, than a typical summer Saturday at the library can be. So I counted my blessings, then counted them again, and eventually, after an hour and twenty minutes had gone by, the elevator man arrived and rescued me. There were three cases of Evelat* in OhioLINK today (two of which were French typos for élévation and the other one an English typo for revelation), and 68 in WorldCat. Be on the lookout for this one in your own catalog and if you find any examples of it stuck in there, get them out. And speaking from personal experience, I'd say the sooner it's done the better. In other words, see you later, elevator!

(1964 New York World's Fair, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Porduc* (for Produce/d, Production) + Reporduc* (for Reproduce/d, Reproduction)

OhioLINK lists 10 examples of "reporduction" (for "reproduction") and 5 examples of "porduction" (for "production"). "Porduced" (for "produced") and "Reporduced" (for "reproduced") is each listed 4 times in OhioLINK.
"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it the Reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist."--Edgar Allan Poe

Catherine Scullion

Strutur* (for Structur*)

"Here's a sentence you will enjoy from a friend's local paper: The library’s financial structure is far more stable than it was 10 years ago when it was forced to shudder its doors because it was broke..."

The coworker who sent me that message was right; I did enjoy it. While I pondered weak and weary, though, I couldn't find a single typo for either shutter or shudder (and we really don't need another Edgar Allan Poe post, in any event). I was, however, struck by the fact that OhioLINK houses 33 cases of Strutur*—almost enough to make us shudder in our structure, but not enough to make us pack up our cataloging manuals and shutter our doors. Contrariwise, let's strut our stuff and correct those typos!

(Craig Wedren playing live with Shudder to Think in 1994, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Daguerro* (for Daguerreo*)

The daguerreotype was the first successful form of photography, developed in the 1830s by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce. A copper plate is coated with silver iodide and exposed in a camera. Mercury vapour is used to develop it, and a salt mixture to make it permanent.

Originally, the exposure process took 3-15 minutes, making it too long to be used for commercial, portrait photography, but later bromine and chlorine were added to the process to shorten it to less than a minute.

The image shown here is a photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe taken in 1848, by W.S. Hartshorn.

A common error in spelling daguerreotype is to leave out the e: daguerrotype. But if you remember that the word comes from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's name (which has that e at the end!) it should be easy, right? As easy as remembering Daguerre's three hyphenated given names (?!) or as easy as sitting completely still for 15 minutes while your portrait is taken.

Leanne Olson