Free Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Page B

dollars a mistake, he would become a rich man. His plan evaporated in the harsh light of morning, however, when he decided that, like the software company, the networks were not Fadimans and would therefore not wish to be improved.
    I myself owned up to a dark chapter from my own hubristic youth. When I was twenty-three, I had discovered fifteen misprints in the Pyramid paperback edition of Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory
. (Samples: page 25, paragraph 2, line 13: “thundercould” for “thundercloud”; page 99, paragraph 1, line 28: “acytelene” for “acetylene”; page 147, paragraph 1, line 27, “rocco” for “rococo.”) Nabokov had always struck me as a bit of a fusspot—had he not once observed, “In reading, one should notice and fondle details”?—so I wrote him a letter listing the errors I had noticed and fondled, on the pretext that he could incorporate the corrections in the next edition. I deserved a kick in the pants for my meddlesomeness, but lo and behold, three weeks later a fragile blue aerogramme with a Swiss postmark arrived from the Montreux-Palace Hotel. In it, Véra Evseevna Nabokov—she who had detonated, on page 219 of the book in question, Nabokov’s “slow-motion, silent explosion of love”—thanked me on her husband’s behalf for my “thoughtfulness.” Her typing was faint but 100 percent error-free.
    I know what you may be thinking: What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies! It is true—and I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. I knew my family would not be distracted by the silver dragées or the pink sugar rose; had I not narrowly averted the punctuational catastrophe, they would all have cried, in chorus, “There’s a superfluous apostrophe!”
    Of course, if you are a compulsive proofreader yourself—and if you are, you know it, since for the afflicted it is a reflex no more avoidable than a sneeze—you are thinking something quite different: What a fine, public-spirited family are the Fadimans! How generous, in these slipshod times, to share their perspicacity with the unenlightened! If you had been alive in 1631, it would have made your day to come across the seventh commandment in the edition of the Bible specially printed for King Charles I, which read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” In 1976, if you read Beverly Sills’s autobiography before it was cleaned up in the second printing, its very first sentence
did
make your day: “When I was only three and still named Belle Miriam Silverman, I sang my first aria in pubic.” Your favorite part of
The New Yorker
is the column fillers. No McPhee profile, no Updike story could satisfy you as completely as the extract from the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
that read:
Meanwhile, Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles’ marrying Diana while she remained his power mower.
    My own power mower, George, does not understand the thrill of such discoveries.. He does not think me a lovable helpmeet when I wander past his computer screen and find my fingers, as if animated by an inner gremlin, inserting a second
r
in
embarass
. I am certain, however, that the gene has passed to our six-year-old daughter. She can’t yet spell well enough to correct words, but she has definitely inherited the proofreading temperament. When she was two and a half, George said to her, pointing at our bird-feeder, “Look, Susannah, a rufous towhee!” Susannah said, witheringly, “No, Daddy, a rufous-
sided
towhee.” It is only a matter of time before she starts adding those missing
r
‘s herself.
    A fter our family dinner, I asked my mother if I could borrow her envelope of clippings from