Heard on Springer: "in the _first_ beginning..."

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> They remind me of a publisher years ago who had made it a practice to
> find mistakes of various kinds in the Bible. He boasted that he would
> print a Bible without an error in it. He had it set up in type and had
> the proofs read successively by seventeen different proofreaders with
> copy holders. Finally everything was marked OK and the presses started
> running. After about 1000 sheets had been run through the press, a
> bystander remarked that there must be a lot of baseball fans among the
> employees. The publisher belligerently inquired what was the matter.
> The bystander quietly pointed to the opening paragraph on the first
> page which read: "In the big inning God created the heavens. . . "
>

Garson, what I'm vaguely (mis-)recalling is this or something very
like it. I was once an avid reader of RD and this is the kind of story
that it loves to re-print. My actual memory is that I read it in the
'40's. However, here of late, I've been trying to avoid making
monumental claims for my memory, so I claimed only the
more-conservative '50's and not the '40's that I really (think that I)
recall.

As for not knowing that there were ever typographical issues that have
cropped up in the printing of the Bible... Well, what can I tell you?
I grew up in The One True Faith.;-) In high school, we had a modest
amount of true, Douay-Bible study <har! har!> in which I learned that
God's name is "Yahweh" and not the "Jehovah" of my KJV-reading,
Methodist roots.

An odd fact is that the Tetragrammaton in (brass? It shines like gold)
Hebrew letters - HWHY - is set onto the exterior wall over the
entrance of Saint Louis's so-called "Old (Catholic) Cathedral." (It's
a surprisingly-tiny little thing, considering that it was *the*
cathedral into the early 1900's, about the size of the building of the
colored Catholic church in Marshall, TX.) Why this - the prominent,
public display of the Tetragrammaton on a Catholic church-building -
should be the case I have no idea, despite the fact that it's
sufficiently unusual that you'd think that it would be a bit of local
lore that every St. Louisan was familiar with.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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