This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
In the summer of 1948, Winston Churchill telephoned his publishers, hopping with rage. He had just received a finished copy of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his epic history of the Second World War. When he opened it, however, he was horrified to find the French Army described as the “poop of the life of France”. Obviously, he had meant to say “prop” — but somehow, a mistake had snuck in. Too late: the best his publishers could do was to include an errata slip and promise to do better in future.
Churchill’s experience was far from unusual. Since human beings first started writing things down they have been getting them wrong. Monks labouring in medieval scriptoria introduced all kinds of errors into the texts they were transcribing. They even invented a demon called Titivillus to blame this on.
And when printing came along, things only got worse. Typos abounded; words got left out; sometimes whole pages got muddled up. Mistakes became a part of life. So much so, in fact, that today, you’d be hard pressed to find a writer who doesn’t have a story about some embarrassing mistake that’s crept into their work.
But typos are just one of many ways books can go wrong. As Rebecca Lee argues, there is a whole catalogue of literary disorders out there. Some books are so badly written that they’re almost unreadable. Take Amanda McKittrick Ros’s Irene Iddesleigh (1897), a novel which was so notoriously bad that, even decades after its publication, J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends would compete to see who could read it out loud for the longest before laughing.
Others — such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover — get censored because they offend public morals. And others still are plagiarised. Then there’s writer’s block, which prevents many books even from making it to print; and, last but not least, the dreaded book review, which can make or (more often) break a publication even before it hits the stands.
Lee knows what she’s talking about. As a senior editorial manager at Penguin Random House, she spends her life around books — and she is brilliant at bringing the bad ones to life. She has a chatty, accessible style and skips from anecdote to anecdote with unconcealed delight. At times, her enthusiasm is positively infectious.
It is a real pity, then, that this book is littered with so many mistakes. Although it is supposed to be a work of history, it is surprisingly fuzzy about … well, history. Take Johannes Gutenberg. Most of us know he kicked off the print revolution in c.1450; yet in the first chapter, we are told that Romeo and Juliet was published in 1598/9, “a half-century or so since … Gutenberg invented moveable type”.
It doesn’t get much better after that. Just a few paragraphs later, Lee tells us that in the late 16th century, “proofreaders didn’t yet exist” — which would have come as news to Gabriel Harvey, who was employed in just such a capacity by the English printer John Wolfe at exactly that time.
If that weren’t enough, we then learn that “proofs have been with us since the 1600s”, even though Desiderius Erasmus was correcting galleys of his work in Venice almost a century earlier. And so it goes on … and on.
Even real historical mistakes get fudged. Remember that typo in Churchill’s book? Perhaps influenced by the hazy memories of Churchill’s literary assistant, Denis Kelly, Lee insists that the offending phrase was “poop of the French nation” — when the printed text clearly reads “poop of the life of France”.
A quick flick through the relevant literature would have been enough to put these right. But this is precisely where Lee falls short. Although she provides a (very brief) bibliography, all but a tiny handful of the supporting notes refer to websites. In some cases, this is perhaps pardonable: given that she refers to a lot of news stories, it makes a certain degree of sense to provide URLs for the relevant articles.
But an awful lot indicate that Lee has drawn her material from pop-history pieces and blogs. These are all very well and good in their way, of course, but are no substitute for serious research. They are often littered with mistakes — and Lee seems trustingly to have assimilated some of their worst offences. Hardly what one would expect of a “book nerd”.
I feel a bit uncharitable hammering away at this book’s shortcomings. For all its faults, it is a fun read, and it’s meant to be light-hearted. But I can’t help feeling that, if you are going to write about why books go “wrong”, you’d better make sure that you get everything right.
