Last week, the UK newspaper The Guardian ran a story about famous typographical errors (“typos”), sparked by an auction of a Harry Potter proof in which the author’s name was misspelt. 🙂
The article gives a number of other examples of mistakes, malapropisms and muddles, but my favourite story was this – when James Joyce was dictating Finnegans Wake to his friend Samuel Beckett, Joyce answered a knock at the door with “Come in” – which Beckett promptly wrote down. 🙂
Misprint the legends: famous typos from James Joyce to JK Rowling can be found here.
I also found a nice collection of ‘landmark’ typos and intentional errors found in literature at the blog of bookstore Barnes & Noble here.