Rcord* (for Record)

One night after closing time, Mary, an assistant at the New York Public Library, played by Parker Posey in the movie Party Girl, picks up a copy of the Dewey Decimal Classification and reads out loud: "Classification provides a system for organizing a universe of items, be they objects, concepts, or records." This clearly intrigues her, while at the same time acting as a lovely, jokey bit of foreshadowing: she is soon seen assiduously arranging and cross-referencing all of her disc jockey roommate's LPs. There are 21 records containing Rcord* in OhioLINK and will probably be a few crashing your gates as well. So first check out your "records." Then you can party, girl.

Carol Reid

Balck* (for Black)

February is Black History Month, which makes it a good time to note that Richard Wright's Native Son, published in 1940, was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection by an African-American author. Richard Wright and the Library Card, by William Miller, is a fictionalized account, based on Wright's autobiography Black Boy, of the way in which the young Richard managed to obtain a library card in the segregated South of the 1920s. (School Library Journal points out that the portrayal of the white librarian is too harsh to square with reality, but the book nevertheless shows the lengths to which this "black boy" had to go to gain access to the world of books.) I discovered 35 cases of Balck (and 52 of Balck*) in OhioLINK, about half of them being typos for black, while the rest are proper names that may or may not be misspelled. (Photograph of Richard Wright reading to his daughter Julia in 1944, from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

Carol Reid

Partnerhip* (for Partnership)

With a lucky seven occasions in OhioLINK, Partnerhip sounds like the sort of spaced-out speller we might've once counted ourselves fortunate to be joined at the hip to. OhioLINK also gives us a hit of Prtner*, four of Partener*, and three of Partnersip. Two was company, but three or more was a countercultural affair for those who sipped from that cup during the 1960s, although hippies apparently go back a lot further than that. Pictured here, circa 1887, are two very hip partners, Fidus—"perhaps the greatest psychedelic artist ever"—and his teacher Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. (From the website Hippie Roots & the Perennial Subculture.)

Carol Reid

Langauge* (for Language)

It's difficult to gauge precisely what it is that makes us human, although hordes of anthropologists, linguists, and assorted "postmodernists" have given it the old college try. Many children fervently hope that their pets will go to heaven and many adults are aware that animals feel emotion. But until recently, with the exception of fictional characters like Dr. Doolittle, few people of any stripe believed that animals could understand human language. Lately, however, certain chimps are making chumps of us in that regard. OhioLINK stamps its foot 76 times for the typo Langauge*, considered "high probability" on the Ballard list. (Photo of Kanzi, the "super-intelligent" bonobo chimp, from Discover magazine.)

Carol Reid

Postscript: An attentive reader points out that Hugh Lofting's animals did not understand human language; Dr. Doolittle understood their languages.

Unkown (for Unknown)

Someone I know recently advised me that last names starting with the letters Unk– are probably typos, since he had never seen any in the course of his job. However, NACO contains over 100 such names, along with a dozen or so "Unknowns," including Unknown Artist, Unknown Biographer, Unknown Christian, Unknown Critic, Unknown D.J., and Unknown hand. ("An unknown hand" was another way of saying "Anonymous.") One of these, an Atlanta-based rapper, eventually shortened his stage name to Unk. You may also recall the Unknown Comic, who was featured on The Gong Show, but isn't listed in the name authority file perhaps because he was unable to write his way out of a paper bag. (There is a heading for the man who played him, though, Murray Langston.) The 1927 Tod Browning film The Unknown stars Lon Chaney as "Alonzo the Armless," in love with a young circus performer, played by Joan Crawford, who has a horror of men's hands, both known and unknown. ("Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!") This film was commercially unavailable for many years until, at a 1973 screening at the George Eastman House, it was announced that an archivist with the Cinémathèque Française had discovered a copy five years earlier among some film canisters marked l'inconnu (films that were "unknown" because of missing titles). OhioLINK reveals 22 cases of Unkown and one of Uknown.

Carol Reid

Finsihed (for Finished)

As this week's postings head for the finish line, we will leave you with one that you probably won't need to worry about. Finsihed is on the lowest level of the main library typos list at This means that it was only found once in OhioLINK when it was discovered. It is a good example of an inverted letter typo. In nearly all such cases, the two letters involved are on opposite sides of the QWERTY keyboard, making it a left brain vs. right brain issue. There are only four of these in WorldCat, and one record makes it clear that the mistake is in the orginal. You could find more than 200,000 of them in Google, but thanks to a little-known limit you can only see the first thousand.

Busness (for Business)

Once again we turn to the most common form of typo in a library catalog - a missing vowel. The letter I is by far the most common offender. This error is found on the B, or high probability, section of the main page of typographical errors at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html. That means that the word was found at least 16 times in the OhioLINK catalog. Although there are many variants of business to be found in those pages, none has been selected to date as the typo of the day. As always, we suggest that you check the record for context before making a change. After all, somebody may have written a book about finding your inner busness.