![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpBack when I worked as a production editor at Plenum, I had the misfortune of sending a journal to press with a cover that, save for the name of the blessed thing, was completely wrong.
It was a most embarrassing moment, and one that I have described previously.
So it is with no small interest that I am quite curious about a pair of nearly identical stamps issued in France in 1937, to mark the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the appearance of a work known to us English-speakers as Discourse on the Method, by René Descartes (aka "Cartesius").
Descartes was quite an amazing fellow. His life spanned several careers. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a soldier. He lived in a time of intellectual giants. Shakespeare died when Descartes was twenty, and Descartes himself lived during the same period as Milton, Galileo, Fermat, and Pascal.
A dream he had led to his developing what has come to be known as analytic geometry, which he wrote about in an appendix to the aforementioned Discourse on the Method.
Now, anyone with a couple of years of high school French under their belt will easily recognize Discours sur la Méthode as a word-for-word translation of Discourse on the Method, and thus, will likely not find anything particularly amiss with the image of the postage stamp below, featuring (among other things) the title of Descartes' work and a drawing of Descartes based on a portrait made by Frans Hals:
As it turns out however, in one of those curious twists of linguistic orneriness, the actual French title of Descartes work is, and always has been, Discours de la Méthode (note the "de" instead of "sur").
One way or another—and how, exactly is what I would like to know—French postal officials became aware of this mistake (roughly the equivalent of referring to Margaret Mitchell's book as Gone with a Wind) and issued a stamp that, with the one editorial change, was identical to the previous stamp:
According to my Yvert & Tellier catalog, 5 million stamps were printed with the wrong title and 4.5 million were then printed with the correct title. And while the stamp is not particularly valuable or rare, the second (correct) stamp is worth more than its erroneous predecessor (my 2009 catalog cites a value of €12 for the corrected stamp in mint condition and with undisturbed gum, which is about three times the value of a "typo" stamp in the same condition.)
It was a most embarrassing moment, and one that I have described previously.
So it is with no small interest that I am quite curious about a pair of nearly identical stamps issued in France in 1937, to mark the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the appearance of a work known to us English-speakers as Discourse on the Method, by René Descartes (aka "Cartesius").
Descartes was quite an amazing fellow. His life spanned several careers. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a soldier. He lived in a time of intellectual giants. Shakespeare died when Descartes was twenty, and Descartes himself lived during the same period as Milton, Galileo, Fermat, and Pascal.
A dream he had led to his developing what has come to be known as analytic geometry, which he wrote about in an appendix to the aforementioned Discourse on the Method.
Now, anyone with a couple of years of high school French under their belt will easily recognize Discours sur la Méthode as a word-for-word translation of Discourse on the Method, and thus, will likely not find anything particularly amiss with the image of the postage stamp below, featuring (among other things) the title of Descartes' work and a drawing of Descartes based on a portrait made by Frans Hals:
As it turns out however, in one of those curious twists of linguistic orneriness, the actual French title of Descartes work is, and always has been, Discours de la Méthode (note the "de" instead of "sur").
One way or another—and how, exactly is what I would like to know—French postal officials became aware of this mistake (roughly the equivalent of referring to Margaret Mitchell's book as Gone with a Wind) and issued a stamp that, with the one editorial change, was identical to the previous stamp:
According to my Yvert & Tellier catalog, 5 million stamps were printed with the wrong title and 4.5 million were then printed with the correct title. And while the stamp is not particularly valuable or rare, the second (correct) stamp is worth more than its erroneous predecessor (my 2009 catalog cites a value of €12 for the corrected stamp in mint condition and with undisturbed gum, which is about three times the value of a "typo" stamp in the same condition.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-12-31 11:57 am (UTC)I've heard such protestations
Every day for twenty years.
Let's have no more explanations.
Save your breath, and save your tears.
As someone who repeatedly busts deadlines for no good reason whatever and therefore cannot justify the deed, I am familiar with the 'I'm sorry.' "defense" and agree that it works quite well. Sometimes I also use it in other circumstances.
---
It's also curious how language changes over centuries, so that the creators of that stamp were perfectly certainly that the phrase was correct. It also reminds me of the very recent (disgusting :-) ) shift in Russian verb use: instead of 'рассказывать о чем-то' it is now popular to 'рассказывать о том, что...' (shudder). But I think the overcomplication is quite similar.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-01 04:37 am (UTC)but I'm only going to remember
Gone with a Wind.
it made me smile
no subject
Date: 2015-01-06 05:35 pm (UTC)That's really neat that the correction is worth more than the error, which is probably because there are more of the error stamps than the corrected stamps.
As for Gone With A Wind, sounds like a terrible story about farts. ;)
I need to get back to my stamp collection. I did finally get some stamp mounts that protect the stamps, now I just need to get some stamps worth using such mounts. ;) For now, I was planning on just using them for stamps I really like, regardless of value, or stamps that are unused.