Some of the Most Famous (and Unfortunate) Printing Mishaps

It’s happened to us all at some point; you spent hours meticulously crafting a document and finally have it ready to print. You hit the print button, triumphantly collect your fresh copy and then...you notice a glaring typo and have to print it all over again.

While this is undoubtedly frustrating, the cost of a misprint is usually just a few sheets of paper and having to shop for replacement ink cartridges a little bit sooner than you’d planned. However, for some, a single printing error can lead to losses in the millions.

Take Google, for example, who had $22 billion wiped off their share value after one silly printer accidently released a press release announcing that Google’s profits had dropped 20% early. In fact, it wasn’t just an early release of a finished document - the document was a draft, signified by the now-infamous phrase ‘pending Larry quote’ (presumably a quote talking up the figures from Google’s head honcho, Larry Page). Cue mass panic and some very red faces at Google and their presumably-in-big-trouble financial printers.

Of course, Google aren’t the first (and definitely won’t be the last) to get caught out by a misprint. Here are a few other unfortunate misprints; keep them in mind next time that picture you print out is slightly wonky!

Man Thinks He’s Won $1million on A Scratchcard; Winning Card is Actually A Misprint

We don’t know about you but we get excited when we win a couple of quid on a scratchcard, so imagine how poor old Paul Pasquarosa felt when he thought he won $1million on his scratchcard. On the day before his birthday, no less.

Unfortunately for Paul, his ticket was actually a misprint thus meaning that he’d actually won nothing - not even the money he paid for the ticket. A small offset in the printing was all that stood between Paul and all the money he could ever wish for. We think his lawyer sums up it best: “Mr. Pasquarosa was not just disappointed, but visibly ill.”

Violinist Undergoes A Rude Name Change Thanks To A Council Flyer

Abdul Shahid is an internationally respected violinist - and perhaps the first man to ever sue a council for renaming him ‘pubic hair’ on a flyer.

Abdul was due to play the Baishakhi Mela Festival in the East End of London last year, a festival Tower Hamlets council were promoting with 85,000 flyers. 85,000 flyers on which they had accidently written Abdul’s name in Bengali as ‘bal’ - the Bengali term for ‘pubic hair’.

Penguin Publishes A Cannibal Cookbook

The Pasta Bible was a delicious collection of pasta recipes published in Australia by Penguin. One of the standout recipes was a yummy tagliatelle dish with sardines, prosciutto, salt and...’freshly ground black people’. Oh dear.

Of course, the recipe was supposed to read ‘black pepper’, but somewhere along the line the error was missed completely. Penguin ended up recalling the offending books and destroying them, costing them a cool $20,000 in the process. However, there was a silver lining for Penguin; the publicity surrounding the book actually led to an increase in sales.

Dewey Defeats Truman...Except He Doesn’t

In the world of 24 hour rolling news, there is a constant race between broadcasters to break news first. It was no different in 1948, when the Chicago Tribune wanted to be the first to announce the winner of the Presidential Election race between Thomas E. Dewey and Harry S. Truman. Instead of waiting for the actual result though, the Tribune decided to guess. You can probably see where this is going...

150,000 copies of the Tribune were printed bearing the legend ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’, based on the paper’s political expert’s opinion. The initial few thousand were forgivable as the results weren’t in, but the paper continued to print the headline as it became clearer that actually Truman had defeated Dewey.

In actuality, the Tribune was forced to guess because of the limitations of printing technology at the time - journalists typed their copy on a typewriter, which then photographed and replicated on a printing plate, a process which meant the paper had to be sent hours before it’s competitors. Makes you thankful for laser printers that can churn out reams of paper in a matter of minutes with just a toner cartridge, doesn’t it?

Even though it’s unlikely that your printing errors will cost you billions of dollars or widespread public embarrassment, it’s always worth previewing your documents before you print to save yourself a few quid on ink and paper!