Typos, something that every reader will notice and correct for at one time or another, are among the simplest examples with which to introduce textual criticism. One of the pleasures of textual scholarship is how it reveals simple typos to be not so simple after all. “Typo” is, of course, short for “typographical error.” Taken literally, it is now a largely outdated term, since type (whether as movable pieces of metal or as part of a typewriter) is now far from the dominant technology for producing and reproducing texts. It hasn’t been dominant for decades. Type presses long ago gave way to other technologies and are now primarily used in hobbies or for books as works of art. Some years ago, I was a member of an English department that still had a $400 budget line for typewriter repair, though no one in the department still had a typewriter. In an effort to get the money transferred to another line so that we could actually use it, I tried to find out if there were any typewriters anywhere on campus and surprisingly found some in storage. None of them looked like they had been used in fifteen years. But it certainly wasn’t the case that no one at that college had created a typo in all that time. In short, “typo” has become a metonym for all manner of textual errors. We talk about “typos” in email messages and web pages that are never printed. We could just as logically call such errors “slips of the pen.”
