TIL that one of the biggest book club debates actually started with a typo in the first printing

I was reading about the history of "The Great Gatsby" for my book club last night and found out that a typo in the original 1925 edition changed a key line. Apparently it said "sick in tired" instead of "sick and tired" and people argued about the author's intent for decades until someone found the error. My club has been debating symbolism for 3 months and now I'm wondering if half our arguments are based on printing mistakes. Anyone else ever find something like that in a classic novel?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninal916d ago

That line about "sick in tired" really hits home because my book club argued for months over a similar thing in "Moby Dick." We were all convinced there was some deep meaning in a weird punctuation choice, but turns out it was just a printing error from the 1800s. Makes you wonder how many hours of discussion we've wasted on mistakes that nobody caught.

sammurray6d ago

Wait but didn't they figure out the "sick in tired" thing way later than people think? Actually I gotta say something about Moby Dick here. The punctuation thing you're talking about with Moby Dick, that wasn't a simple printing mistake from the 1800s. The original manuscript shows Melville actually wrote those weird dashes and semicolons on purpose. He had a really specific style with punctuation that modern editors just changed because they thought it looked wrong. So your group might have actually been onto something. It's the opposite problem really - sometimes we think something is a mistake when it was actually the author's choice all along. Not saying all those old books are perfect, but we should be careful blaming things on old printers when sometimes the writer really meant to do that.