Festivus?

"Plum" also paid endless attention to detail. On display is a letter to the novelist Arnold Bennett, thanking him for his praise. "I can never see why printers should do their job so slackly," he writes. In Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit, the story Bennett had admired, Bertie Wooster tells Jeeves that he has been invited somewhere for "the festive s" – it was a habit of Bertie's to substitute the initial letter for the whole word. The first edition rendered this as "festives". The American edition changed it to "festivities". The later Omnibus edition stuck in "Christmas" instead. It was not until 1999 that the Penguin edition fulfilled the author's intention. —Telelgraph

(Via Jenny)

Typos in the news

I.
[...] Thursday afternoon, Mr. de Blasio’s name was removed from the Democratic Party line on the ballot by the New York City Board of Elections. The reason? A cover page on his packet of signatures said that there were 131 folders when there were actually 132. —"For a Typo?" NYT op-ed, 7/25

II.
The Rushmore, a new 41-story glass and stone condominium tower on Riverside Boulevard at the Hudson River, seemed serene on a recent visit. The flowers in the interior courtyard were in full bloom; the ground-level pool had been filled. Sixteen buyers had already moved in.
And yet an error of a single digit in an arcane document — the densely worded 732-page offering plan — could upset that happy picture, and cost the sponsors, the Extell Development Company and the Carlyle Group, tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue, lawyers say.
[...]Under state regulations, a sponsor is required to provide an operating budget for the first year of a new condominium, so buyers know what to expect when they move in. If the first closing does not occur by the end of the budget year, the sponsor is required to submit a new budget, and give the buyers a right to rescind their contracts.
At the Rushmore, somebody goofed. The offering plan promised to give buyers a right to back out of the plan if the first closing did not occur before the first day of the budget year, Sept. 1, 2008, rather than Sept. 1, 2009, after the last day. The first closing occurred in February 2009.
—"Attack of the Fine Print," NYT Real Estate, 7/26