Errata: A Printer's Word for Mistakes
Franklin named his life's wrongs with a printing term: errata — misprints in the text. Not concealed, not agonized over: listed, owned, and corrected where the plate still allowed.
When young Franklin broke his indenture to escape his brother's beatings, he judged himself plainly: “It was not fair in me to take this advantage, and this I therefore reckon one of the first errata of my life.” When he drifted from Deborah Read in London, writing her a single letter — “This was another of the great errata of my life, which I should wish to correct if I were to live it over again.”
The metaphor does real work. A sin condemns the author; an erratum marks a correctable fault in one passage of a long book. The printer's response to an erratum is neither denial nor despair — it is a correction slip and a cleaner next impression.
He opened the whole book with it: he would happily relive his life, “only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first.”
And he did correct what he could — he later married Deborah, and spent a lifetime repaying early unfairness with public usefulness. The errata stayed on the record; that was the point.
Keep an errata list
Name the misprint plainly
Write the mistake down in one factual sentence, as Franklin did — what you did, whom it touched. The printer's term lowers the shame enough to let you look at it.
Set the correction for the next edition
For each erratum, decide what repair is still possible: an apology, a debt repaid, a relationship resumed. Some corrections take years — Franklin's did.
- What can still be corrected?
- What must simply stand on the record?
Change the plate, not just the page
Fix the practice that produced the error so the next impression can't repeat it. Correcting one copy while keeping the flawed plate reprints the fault forever.
He could not unprint the first edition of his life. He could make every impression after it cleaner — and he showed his work.