Last chance to see...

Our November spotlight exhibition is drawing to a close, and this week in Bad Books we focus on the cancel. A more radical and costly alternative to the simple acknowledgement of errors as achieved through the insertion of an errata list or slip, the cancel involved the removal of an offending leaf and the pasting of a new (and hopefully error-free) one to its stub. Cancels are not always easy to detect.

An unusually obvious cancel in The commercial restraints of Ireland considered in a series of letters to a noble lord. (Dublin : William Hallhead, 1779)

While errata hint at the fallibility of the printing process, cancels erased errors without a trace and as such have more in common with the fluid and ephemeral electronic texts of our digital age.

If you would like to view the Bad Books exhibition, please contact the staff of the Special Collections Reading Room in the Hardiman Research Building at specialcollections@nuigalway.ie.

The spotlight exhibition can also be viewed in its entirety on the digital display wall in the Hardiman Foyer during the month of November.