Famous misprints in history, from the 1631 Wicked Bible

The most famous misprint in history left out one word: a King James Bible of 1631 whose seventh commandment read "Thou shalt commit adultery". The University of Canterbury's Wicked Bible Project calls it "the English language's most famous typographical error" (Jones, n.d.), and much that is repeated about it, from Star Chamber to the burning of every copy, is not what the record says.

EdCitation publishes this guide. It rests on the 1632 court reports as printed in 1886, the Bible Society's 1903 catalogue, the Wicked Bible Project, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Postal Museum and NASA, all read on 3 October 2026; a story we could not trace is marked unconfirmed.

Misprints matter to anyone who cites, because two copies of one book can differ. The last sections show how to quote one and cite the edition you read, with EdCitation's free Cite a source and Find sources. EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, a line we hold with pride: it looks a reference up and leaves every sentence to you.

What was the Wicked Bible?

The Wicked Bible is the octavo King James Bible printed in London in 1631 by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, in which Exodus 20:14 lacks "not"; Martin Lucas is sometimes named as his partner (Darlow & Moule, 1903). The nickname is not from 1631: the American book dealer Henry Stevens coined it in 1855, when he showed a copy to the Society of Antiquaries of London (Jones, n.d.).

A second error turned up later. Deuteronomy 5:24 should say the Lord has shown his glory and his "greatnesse"; three North American copies, among them an uncorrected one at the Dunham Bible Museum in Houston, print "his great asse" (Jones, n.d.). The court heard about both.

How many Wicked Bibles survive?

At least 25 copies survive, 18 of them in institutions from the United States to New Zealand; until 2022 the usual estimate was fewer than ten (Jones, n.d.). The copy in Rome was recognised only in February 2023, ten years after Google Books put it online. The 1903 catalogue gives the edition as 1,000 copies and says Stevens listed only four (Darlow & Moule, 1903).

What does the 1632 court record say?

The case went to the Court of High Commission, which policed religious printing, not to Star Chamber. Notes of its sittings, edited by Gardiner (1886), record a cause begun on 8 May 1632 against Barker for false printing "in divers places" and very bad paper. The Bishop of London warned that an English press in Amsterdam already printed better Bibles and undersold London's (pp. 296–297).

At the hearing of 14 June 1632 the printers blamed their workmen. The Bishop said he had acted only when his footman bought a copy, and the Archbishop of Canterbury complained that Bible printing, once done by learned men, now had "the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned" (Gardiner, 1886, p. 305).

The reports stop there. Stedman (2024), writing for the Wicked Bible Project, gives the outcome: a fine of £300 on Barker and Lucas, which the court in the end forgave. Jones (n.d.) adds that impounded books were handed back to be corrected before sale, and several surviving copies show attempts to mend the errors. Peter Heylyn wrote in 1668 that the printers were "deeply fined" and that Laud spent part of the fine on a Greek type (Darlow & Moule, 1903).

Wicked Bible myths, checked

Which other Bible misprints are documented?

Several, recorded edition by edition in the Bible Society's 1903 catalogue. In our view most famous typos in history are Bible typos because every word of a Bible was read closely.

The "He" and "She" Bibles, and the Judas Bible

The first King James Bibles survive in two series, named from Ruth 3:15: one reads "he went into the city", the other "she". Bibliographers generally agree that the folio "He" Bible of 1611 is the first printing (Darlow & Moule, 1903).

The second folio, the "Great She Bible", carries a general title usually dated 1613 and a New Testament title dated 1611, and in many copies the 1613 has been changed to 1611 by pen. In Matthew 26:36 it names Judas where Jesus should be (Darlow & Moule, 1903). Werner (2012) shows the Folger's copy with "Jesus" printed on a slip pasted over the error, slightly askew, so that the J underneath shows.

John Field's pocket Bible, 1653

Field's tiny 1653 Bible printed 1 Corinthians 6:9 as "the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God". William Kilburne, who reckoned nearly 20,000 copies were in circulation, reported on a doctor of divinity's word that libertines quoted the verse in their own defence; many copies were probably corrected with replacement leaves (Darlow & Moule, 1903).

The Vinegar Bible, 1717

John Baskett's grand Oxford folio held so many misprints that it was nicknamed "A Baskett-full of Errors". The headline above Luke 20 reads "The parable of the vinegar" for vineyard, which gave the Vinegar Bible its name (Darlow & Moule, 1903).

What are the most famous printing errors outside the Bible?

Two famous errors outside the Bible are a stamp and a space probe, and the second is usually told wrongly.

The Inverted Jenny, 1918

The 24-cent US airmail stamp of 1918 was printed in two colours in two passes, and on one sheet the blue aeroplane went in upside down, because either the frame sheet or the blue plate entered the press inverted. The Washington post office sold that one undetected sheet of 100 on 14 May 1918, to the collector William T. Robey (National Postal Museum, n.d.-b). The museum calls it "one of the world's most famous printing errors" (National Postal Museum, n.d.-a).

Mariner 1 and the "hyphen", 1962

The popular story blames a missing hyphen for the loss of the Venus probe Mariner 1. NASA's page says the rocket veered off course after launch on 22 July 1962 and was destroyed at 294.5 seconds, a failure traced to a guidance antenna and to an equation lacking the overbar on the symbol R. The omission was not a hyphen, "as is sometimes erroneously reported" (NASA, n.d.). The "most expensive hyphen in history" is widely credited to Arthur C. Clarke; we found it in no text by Clarke, so the attribution is unconfirmed.

Famous misprints, with their sources

What is an errata slip, and how were misprints corrected?

An errata slip, or errata list, is a printed list of mistakes found after a book was printed, with corrections for readers to make themselves. It was one of five remedies open to a hand-press printer, each shown in the Folger's books by Werner (2012, 2015):

• Stop-press correction: type fixed mid-run, so early and late sheets differ.
• Errata list: small errors listed for the reader's pen.
• Cancel slip: the right words pasted over the wrong ones.
• Cancel leaf: a reprinted leaf replacing a faulty one; some owners bound in both.
• Hand correction: in one Folger copy of Thomas James's 1612 The Iesuits downefall, a wrong date was scraped off and rewritten.

What did errata lists look like?

Repo (2018), a University of Turku master's thesis whose abstract we read, studied 80 English books with errata lists printed between 1529 and 1700, ten from every 25 years. The lists usually sat at the back of the book; the heading "Faults escaped" was commoner than "Errata" until 1600 and then vanished from the sample; and the books averaged anywhere from 0.01 to 1.07 listed errors per page. The errors fell into four kinds: omission, addition, substitution and transposition.

Errata that needed errata

Werner (2015) shows a 1660 Homer whose errata list itself needed a pasted correction, a 1590 Pomponius Mela with a slip one letter wide turning "wohthy" into "worthy" in a title, and Augustine Vincent's 1622 A discouerie of errours, a book named for the errors it found in a catalogue of the nobility and itself "notoriously, riddled with errors".

Journals still issue errata. Under the ICMJE's recommendations, a journal that finds an honest error publishes a correction notice citing the original and posts a dated new version, and "The citation should be to the most recent version" (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, n.d.). Lerer (2003) opens a chapter on errata by admitting an error in every publication of the author's own: "We live, in the academy, by blunder."

How do you quote and cite an edition that has a misprint?

Quote the words as printed, mark the error, and cite the edition, version or copy you read. Copies of one edition can differ, as the corrected Wicked Bibles and the Judas slips show, so for a rare book the copy matters and for a journal article the version does.

1. Find the edition. Search for studies in EdCitation's Find sources; for an early book, note whose digitised copy you used (history books for students).
2. Quote it exactly. APA keeps the source's spelling and punctuation even where it is wrong, and puts sic, italic in square brackets, after an error that could confuse, or suggests a paraphrase (American Psychological Association, 2022). Other styles: Latin abbreviations in academic writing.
3. Date the version you read. For a Bible, APA uses the year of the version used, plus the earlier year of a republication: its online King James Bible, based on the 1769 text, is cited as 1769/2017 (American Psychological Association, 2020).
4. Build the reference from the record in Cite a source, from the edition's DOI or ISBN; it screens each source for retraction.
5. Look for corrections. Cite an article's latest corrected version; retractions are covered in retracted papers in your reference list.
6. Check the list in Verify references, free: a reference copied from another paper carries its misprints, as studies of citation errors show.

The court reports we read are Gardiner's 1886 edition, so the citation is (Gardiner, 1886, p. 305), not 1632. How printers' spellings settled is in how printing fixed English spelling.

How does EdCitation help you cite the right edition?

EdCitation is, in our view, the best tool for this step, because a misprint in a reference list is usually a copied one, and EdCitation never copies: it looks each reference up in the publisher's record and never writes one. Cite a source builds a reference from a DOI, title, PubMed ID, ISBN or web address in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, and screens each source for retraction. It is free with no account, like Find sources and Verify references; Pricing lists the Pro and Max plans.

Cite a source, run on three works named here

On 3 October 2026, Lerer's DOI, 10.1017/cbo9780511483974.002, came back from Crossref in APA 7 as:

Lerer, S. (2003). Errata: Print, politics and poetry in early modern England. In K. Sharpe & S. N. Zwicker (Eds.), Reading, society and politics in early modern England (pp. 41–71). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511483974.002

The chapter and the book are both in sentence case, with the editors named, as APA asks. No retraction was reported.

Stedman's DOI, 10.26021/15195, came back from the DOI registry titled Uncommon Justice: The court of High Commission in the early 17th century on both runs: lower-case justice, capitalise Court, part of the court's name, and add Chris Jones, whom the project names as editor and the record does not.

The paperback ISBN of Sarah Werner's guide to hand-press books, 9781119049968, came back from Open Library as "Werner, S. (2019). Studying early printed books, 1450-1800: A practical guide. Wiley." It stands: Wiley dates the paperback March 2019 and the ebook December 2018, so cite the format you read.

Find sources, run once

Find sources searched "errata early modern printing" and reported 1,346 results from OpenAlex. First came Repo's 2018 thesis, which we then read and cite above. The first eight also held a fluid-mechanics review and a dissertation filed under the venue Human Biology: read every record before you trust it.

Quick questions

What was the Wicked Bible?

A 1631 King James Bible, printed in London by Robert Barker, whose Exodus 20:14 leaves out "not". At least 25 copies survive.

Who punished the printers of the Wicked Bible?

The Court of High Commission in 1632, not Star Chamber, with a £300 fine that was later forgiven.

What is an errata slip?

A printed list of mistakes found after printing, for readers to correct by hand. Single errors were also covered with pasted slips.

Was Mariner 1 lost because of a missing hyphen?

No. NASA traces the failure to a guidance antenna and an equation lacking the overbar on the symbol R, and says the omission was not a hyphen.

How do I quote a misprint in an essay?

Copy it exactly, add sic in square brackets if it could confuse, and cite the edition you read, built from its DOI or ISBN in EdCitation's free Cite a source.

References

• American Psychological Association. (2020). Religious work references. APA Style. Archived August 25, 2026, at https://web.archive.org/web/20260825131420/https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/religious-work-references
• American Psychological Association. (2022). Quotations that contain errors. APA Style. Archived September 29, 2026, at https://web.archive.org/web/20260929082522/https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/quotations/errors
• Darlow, T. H., & Moule, H. F. (1903). Historical catalogue of the printed editions of Holy Scripture in the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (Vol. 1). The Bible House. https://archive.org/details/historicalcatal00librgoog
• Gardiner, S. R. (Ed.). (1886). Reports of cases in the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. Camden Society. https://archive.org/details/cu31924069587248
• International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (n.d.). Corrections and version control. ICMJE. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/corrections-and-version-control.html
• Jones, C. (n.d.). The Wicked Bible. The Donnithorne Wicked Bible, University of Canterbury. Retrieved October 3, 2026, from https://digitalvoyages.canterbury.ac.nz/omeka-s/s/wicked-bible/page/the-story
• Lerer, S. (2003). Errata: Print, politics and poetry in early modern England. In K. Sharpe & S. N. Zwicker (Eds.), Reading, society and politics in early modern England (pp. 41–71). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511483974.002
• NASA. (n.d.). Mariner 1. NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mariner-1/
• National Postal Museum. (n.d.-a). 1918: The Inverted Jenny. Smithsonian Institution. Archived July 9, 2025, at https://web.archive.org/web/20250709052339/https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/william-h-gross-stamp-gallery-gems-of-american-philately/1918-the-inverted-jenny
• National Postal Museum. (n.d.-b). US airmail stamps/Inverted Jenny. Smithsonian Institution. Archived July 10, 2025, at https://web.archive.org/web/20250710185046/https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/fad-to-fundamental-airmail-in-america-airmail-object-showcase-stamps-and-covers-us
• Repo, L. (2018). Errors and corrections: Early modern English errata lists in 1529–1700 and their connection to prescriptivism [Master's thesis, University of Turku]. UTUPub. Archived December 15, 2025, at https://web.archive.org/web/20251215231256/https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/146176
• Stedman, A. (2024). Uncommon justice: The Court of High Commission in the early 17th century (C. Jones, Ed.). Canterbury University Press. https://doi.org/10.26021/15195
• Werner, S. (2012, March 1). Correcting mistakes. The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/correcting-mistakes/
• Werner, S. (2015, April 14). Correcting with cancel slips. The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/correcting-with-cancel-slips/