Typographical errors and one 'accident of syntax'

Despite, or perhaps because of, the constant corrections and re-setting of every page, a few typographical errors did creep into the 280,000 words of text.

Vyvyan Richards appears to have gone through the volume with a fine-tooth comb, remarking in his book Portrait of T E Lawrence (1) 'In all this great book of perhaps a million and a half letters or more I have only picked up, reading just for the sense, these misprints.' He then notes a number of points:

Page XV is incorrectly numbered VIII.

There is no Chapter XI, the eleventh chapter being numbered XII, so that by the end of the book there would appear to be 123 chapters instead of the actual total of 122. As mentioned previously, this was because of the omission of the original Chapter I, after which the re-numbering process was given up at Chapter XI.

Page 330, line 15, 'upshop' instead of 'upshot'.

Page 501, an out-of-place full stop in the final line of the page, so that the final sentences read - 'Abdulla brought me/supper, rice and camel-meal. (Farraj's camel) Afterwards we slept.'.

Page 523, an 's' upside down. Mr Richards must have had a typographer's eye for miniscule detail - I confess to reading the page through several times before finding the offending 's' in 'such', line 17.

Page 572, line 22, 'armoured-plated' for 'armour-plated'.

Page 626, line 32, 'publickly' for 'publicly'.

And, finally, what he describes as 'perhaps the accident of the mixed-up syntax of "Owdi still wore a long, rich, fur-/lined German officer's greatcoat"', in the last two lines on p 133.

Vyvyan Richards also records 'One of his [Lawrence's] favourite slips - the "great white pants of the engine" - was spotted in time, and reluctantly removed'.

Writing in Friends later (2), Mr Richards had noticed two further misprints - '12' in place of '11', and a 'p' for a 't' - but I have been unable to put a page number to these. A few more can, however, be added to the collection - a vertical bar has crept into the text after 'The McMahon negotiations' in the penultimate line of p VII; in the list of illustrations, p XIX, the page reference for False quiet is given in lower case Roman numerals - xviii - whereas the actual page number is in caps - XVIII; on p 131, a full stop is omitted from the margin heading - 'Order of/march/18.I 17'; on p 554, there is no full stop following the last word of Chapter CIV; and there is an error in the titling of one of the illustrations which follow the text - 'Tafas. Chap. CVIII', whereas in fact the incident which it depicts occurs in Chapter CXVIII.

Most of these noted errors were corrected in the first trade edition, which perhaps had its own crop of proof readers' nightmares. The fur-lined German officer stood his ground, however, and, somewhat surprisingly, 'armoured-plated' remained unaltered.

1	Cape, 1936, p 189
2	p 391

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