Rare Book Monthly
There's Money in Misspellings
Swann didn't misspell Shaespeare, this book's author did (see highlight), but this still makes the book hard to find.
This brings us to another point. Ebay sellers aren’t the only people who can be spelling-challenged. If you go to Abebooks and type in “Shakespeare” as the author, you will get back 40,000 results. However, there are another 539 listed under “Shakespear.” At the top end is one priced for $7,880 which will never be found in a search for “Shakespeare.” The seller is from England, no less. There are 226 more for “Shakspeare” and 2 for “Shakspear.” One of these is in German and the German bookseller has dutifully added “sic” after the name “Shakspear,” but you are still not going to find his book unless you search for the misspelling.
Now here’s another one. The Bard’s name is even spelled “Shakespear” on some live auction listings. Now this isn’t a Shakespeare book itself, but an associated item. It’s a 1704 work called “The Tragedy of Jane Shore. Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s Style.” Hopefully, the author, Nicholas Rowe, did a better job of imitating Shakespeare’s style than his name. The auction houses, in this case both Christie’s and Swann’s, with copies for sale in April, faithfully copied Rowe’s spelling. Those searching for old imitation Shakespeare might well have been stymied in their searches. That brings up another point. Not all “misspellings” are truly misspellings. Some are simply ancient or alternative spellings. Still if you don’t seek them, you will not find.
Now, despite being a writer for the Americana Exchange, I don’t like to blatantly push the site’s service in my articles. Something about objectivity and ethics and things like that. So, if you are offended by this, please skip ahead to the next paragraph. But, the AE does offer a search program as part of the MatchMaker/Auction Notice service which searches on a daily basis dozens of live auctions along with eBay for whatever keywords you select. I was able to find the “Shakespear” items at auction by entering that spelling into my keywords and waiting for the matches. I’m not aware of any other practical way to locate listings by keywords at so many different auction houses, even correctly spelled keywords let alone misspelled ones. It really is an amazingly useful tool. It’s available with an Octavo or higher membership. You can learn more by visiting “Become a Member” or “AE Tour” on this site’s top toolbar. Now back to the story.
Let’s look at one more word: “dinsey.” What is “dinsey?” Unlike the others, this misspelling is so bad many people won’t even know what it was supposed to be. The real word here is “Disney,” like Walt. Someone who writes “dinsey” is not likely to believe this is the correct spelling. More probable, they just accidentally reversed two letters and didn’t notice it. Yet as seemingly obvious as this misspelling is, there are still 27 “dinsey” items being sold on eBay as I write. Perhaps that’s because there are 93,125 “Disney” items currently for sale.
We’ll close with an example of how you might use these lessons to build your own collection, as it applies directly to someone like you or I, in this case, I. I grew up in the small town of New Paltz, New York. Many of you have heard of it recently when the village’s Green Party mayor became the first official east of San Francisco to marry gay couples. My, but times have changed. When I left three decades ago, you couldn’t be elected dogcatcher if you weren’t a Republican. But back then, none of you had heard of New Paltz either. And due to this anonymity, many visitors confused the name. It was forever being referred to as “New Platz.” “Platz” just rolls of the tongue easier than “Paltz.” Occasionally, sellers make the same mistake. There won’t always be something from “New Platz” on eBay as there are only a handful of items with the correct spelling for sale. However, if you watch carefully, once in awhile they will show up. On Abebooks, there are 69 “New Platz” listings, mostly German books where that spelling is correct. Mixed in with them are 3 titles from New Paltz, the name misspelled, invisible to the world, their invisibility totally unknown to their would-be sellers.
