Today we're going to get a little Easter punny. OhioLINK yields 21 hits on the search Crucifiction, all but five of which basically refer to the same item, an eighteenth-century relic entitled A Copy of a Letter Written by Our Blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ: Found Under a Great Stone Sixty-five Years After His Crucifiction. The finders of this piece clearly didn't find it fictive, but the fact that some of the records include [sic] in the title suggests that the sin was in the original. Two sound recordings (Assück's Anticapital, "Specialized Crucifiction" and Procol Harum's A Salty Dog, "Crucifiction Lane") are most likely wordplay; another one, from The Children's Bible, surely is not. And then there's the strange case of Kafka Kalmar: Une Crucifiction, where it's hard to tell whether the misspelling was intentional and a subsequent edition with a slightly reworded title "corrected" it to Crucifixion or it was a typo in the original. Blessedly, my own OPAC proved immaculate in this regard, although WorldCat currently contains 69 records with Crucifiction in the title (some of which are pointedly deliberate, such as Crucifixion or Crucifiction?). Nineteen records, however, can be nailed for introducing this typo into a subject field. The Ballard list was a revelation too, with Crucifixen, Crucifixon, Crucifixian, and Crucifixtion, in addition to the also potentially sardonic Crucifixation.
Carol Reid
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