(Another bogus in?) Google's metadata mish-mash

[Joel S. Berson]

At 12/22/2010 04:00 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:

>Since the title
>page<http://books.google.com/books?id=6M8TAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=1&f=false>(click
>on thumbnail at top left) clearly says
> >
> > M.DC.XXXII
>
>= 1632, I didn't see what you were basing your objection on, unless on the
>date of the author, which could have been another person, or on a better
>sense of history than mine (which is pretty poor).

Yes I saw the title page date.  I was basing my objection on two
library catalogs, Harvard and the ESTC/BL, which correct the
M.DC.XXXII to "[ie., 1732]".

>But page 124 has the
>smoking... pistol (ignoring italics and long s's):
>
>Mustafa, Dey or King of Algiers, in the Year 1706. returning from his not
> > very successful Campaign against Tunis, was strangled before he entered the
> > City, ...
>
>
>Searching for Hindu-Arabic digits yields mostly false hits, but this is
>another definite one (p117):
>
>And to conclude, the Sum of what I there find, under the Year 1661. is no
> > other, than that this Historian learns from Oran...
>
>
>So the year on the title page is certainly not that of publication. It might
>be the year the printing house was established (either Mears or Stone), but
>as metadata for the book it's dead wrong. Nice find!

More likely the printer did not know the language required for
scholarly work in the 18th century.  This I think is probably simply
an error in typesetting a Latin date, leaving out one C.  (I've
occasionally encountered similar title page errors in 17th and 18th
century books.)

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org