I was perusing a magazine last weekend when something caught my eye. I’m a speed reader and I have this disorder where typographical issues jump out at me as if I’m viewing one of those Magic Eye 3D images. Did you already spot this one?

Fort Arbaham Lincoln. Hm. Okay, so my disorder doesn’t end there. I figured perhaps there might be a legitimate use of Arbaham somewhere, so I typed “Arbaham” into Google and got some interesting results.

Most noteworthy is a book titled A Man of the People: a Drama of Abraham Lincoln. This stood out right away, so I went to Barnes and Noble’s site to see if it really was listed under that title. Yup.

Borders has this book by Thomas Dixon listed twice on their search engine. Both times it’s with Abraham, not Arbaham.

I found listings for Arbaham on Amazon, Biblio, Alibris, and others. So who’s right? All of them, sorta…

A quick search of the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) these folks are using for Thomas Dixon’s 1920 book, #9781140264811, shows a typo in the ISBN registry listing for this book. That means whoever relies on the ISBN entry as their source for correct information on this book has a problem.

Since this book is in the public domain, you can read it online for free or even download it in various formats and note that the cover page has the correctly spelled title, meaning that Borders has it right. However, since the other sites are using the “official” title of the ISBN registry, can you blame them?

Anyway, we all make little slips from time to time. It happens. Sometimes it’s funnier than others, sometimes it goes completely unnoticed for decades. While this book was written in 1920, the ISBN has only been in use for a little over fifty years. Hopefully my typographical errors and misspellings will live on in infamy as well for someone to discover later. Have a great weeekend! 😉