'I stand a wreck'

Editors are doomed to read everything for errors---and to know that their own work will not escape egregious ones.

The Jan. 17 New York Review of Books has a brilliant review, by the novelist Hilary Mantel, of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. But my attention was derailed when, halfway through, the name of a character, Anya, suddenly became Anna. And then after a few paragraphs changed back. I spent some time trying to figure out if this was intentional. Had the author changed Anya's name for a reason? Not that I could tell. This appeared to be simply the NYRB's copyeditor sleeping on the job.

"I stand a wreck on error's shore," wrote Adah Isaacs Menken in a much different context. But I always think of her words as the Copyeditor's Hymn. None of us can escape---I nearly wrote "Mencken" from false analogy to H.L.

Sigh.